From Morning Until Night – Oil/canvas – 24 x 30 inches
Many of my paintings are designed to look like screen shots, like scenes from some larger narrative, as if you had walked into a darkened theatre after the film had started, or you had opened a random page in the middle of a novel and were unaware of what had happened before and what would occur later on.
The painting shows a hotel room in Madrid: a rumpled bed, a young woman on a balcony looking down a narrow street. On the wall above the lamp hangs a reproduction of a painting from 1652 by Diego Velázquez of a princess, painted at her age of two, a little girl who would not live to celebrate her 22nd birthday.
If you wanted to, you could interpret this painting in several ways. One viewer told me she thought the young woman was a prostitute. Well, I suppose this could be so, but that was not my intention. I’m interested in the lives of women in general, especially women who find themselves alone, living in what is still a man’s world.
In any case, in future posts you will see this woman again, and many of her sisters. I admire their curiosity, determination and resilience. But the scenes, like this one, will always remain ambiguous, as they should be. Thankfully, the women know themselves much better than I know them.
There is one other thing I need to tell you, a coincidence which I did not realize until a few moments ago as I was writing this post: the young model who leans over the balcony in this painting was a former student of mine. She was a fearless young artist and, later, a college graduate with a degree in engineering. A few years ago, one of her younger sisters discovered her body, two days dead, on the floor of her little kitchen. She was older than twenty-two, but not by much.
#metoo #fineart #contemporaryart #realistart #nightvisions #visualpoetry #oilpaintingsforsale Source: https://ift.tt/2Bqj0lo
