"Birth Day"

8 x 10"

oil on panel
sold 

I completed another for my upcoming show The Ladies - featuring Birth of Venus by Sandro Botticelli, painted in 1485.

The painting depicts Venus, the goddess of love and beauty, arriving on the island of Cyprus - born of the sea spray and blown in by the winds (Zephyr and Aura on the upper left).  She stands on a giant scallop shell, symbolizing purity and perfection like a pearl.  The woman on the right side welcoming Venus is thought to be one of the Graces, the Hora of spring.

Botticelli's painting was most likely commissioned by the Medici family, hung in their Villa of Castello back in the 15th century.  It currently hangs in The Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy.

Please click here for a larger view.

"Ancestry"

6 x 8"

oil on panel
sold

The first thing Brett said when he saw this finished painting was "they have the same slumped shoulders".  I didn't even notice that until he said so.  As if the portrait was of a distant relative of the woman viewing her, hence the title.

A little background of the woman in the painting, Madame Moitessier.  Marie-Clotilde-Ines de Foucauld, at the age of 21, married a super-rich banker and lace merchant twice her age.  Life was comfortable for the couple in French high-society and soon Marie began looking for an artist to paint her and her daughter's formal portrait.

Ingres was approached by an artist friend who passed on Madame Moitessier's request for a portrait and he was so smitten with her "terrible and beautiful head", he eagerly accepted the commission.  Portrait of Madame Moitessier was one of two paintings Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres did of the French woman - one seated and this one standing.  Why is Marie's daughter is not in the portrait?  Ingres found her "impossible" and eliminated her from the composition.

The Portrait of Madame Moitessier hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

"Time For Church"

6 x 8"

oil on panel
sold

I was lucky to have seen an exhibit last year - at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art - featuring many of Georgia O'Keeffe's works.  Yes, several close-up flowers that are so familiar were there to please the masses but I'm more enamored with her buildings in New Mexico and New York City, including Cebolla Church.

O'Keeffe lived in the same county in New Mexico and often passed through the small village of Cebolla.  Her painting is of the Church of Santo Nino, a stark, simplistic adobe building - but with a pitched roof unlike the typical flat-roofed adobe structures mainly because Cebolla gets more snow in the winter than the lower areas of the state.