This work-in-progress really challenges what limited skills I possess and I hope, when finished, will reward a viewer (or many?) who encounter her. Apart from the beauty of the subject, the colors, placement and crude technique of mark-making there is (as I see it) the unfolding struggle I am having to not make a story about flesh and beauty but more about human strength with vulnerability, about the space which separates us being as well the channel that joins us, our humanity everywhere so obvious yet obscured and displaced in today's world. I get that the pose looks classic in a sense and dates perhaps to an earlier artistic period but although that might make this image seem a dusty relic of sorts I see it as a form of a link (not digital!) to all we've learned in our human struggles to survive and grow in the face of the voids around us.
I don't know if the artist should critique the work or endeavor to plumb the source of inspiration or the intention of the piece. The work itself reveals the maker in spite of any intention. So what I am making here is saying me, myself but as in life I think I guard my interior and at the same time have a willingness to present it in a painting as an ambiguous statement for others to sort out.
Not a trick! Just the viewers burden and license.
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