A PICTURE FOR LETITIA

LETITIA

This is the painting which was sent to Canada as part of the International Women Celebrate exhibition where women around the world participated in raising funds for the Haiti disaster. I called it Letitia.

This painting was a very emotive exercise for me, starting it while with a dying friend, during her last week of therapy.

Even looking at it now, I feel the tears well up in my eyes, remembering our long and deep conversations, how she lay on the couch with tubes coming out her nose, quietly watching me work and giggling softly at my frustrations. After only a year, we formed a strong and strange bond where her circumstances called for complete trust in me and my absolute devotion to her.

Occasionally I still feel her presence, especially now that I am busy on a family portrait.

There are things added to the painting however which make me smile. Wanting to include everything which my senses were experiencing at the time, I painted it in. Eg, looking carefully, you will see that the toe of the naked,curled up figure in the centre, its abnormally large. A dear friend cracked her toe against something and said that it was big and swollen....well, I happened to be painting the feet at the time, so I added the mental image!

The figure of Jesus was part of a dream. I had three small incomplete pictures of the face of Jesus which I'd started a while back. Now one of them had shot through the canvas!!

I felt compelled to paint it although it had obviously not been part of the initial genre (of women being compared to flowers, tender, bendable, beautiful, vulnerable).

The result; ( for me anyway)...., was a very disjointed picture,..... but a picture that evoked applause and tears in Canada. The owner of the gallery hung it in her bedroom till the opening and apparently it was one of the first to be sold. What better compliment is there than that?! Mission accomplished, for me and for a very special friend. She knew it was being dedicated to her so I know she's smiling.

The lesson in that was that Jesus is always behind us in whatever we do, BUT HE WANTS TO BE PART OF THE PICTURE...TRUST HIM.