Companions II

This is a painting I completed just about one year ago. I had just moved to cape cod and was enjoying the winter, but somewhat lonesome without my husband, Kurt, who was still back in NY readying our house there for sale.

Two months ago, I submitted this painting to a call for works put out by an Art/Literature/Photography Journal called The Whitefish Review (www.WhitefishReview.org). It has, I am pleased to say, been included in their most recent publication (volume 4, issue 2). Here is more about the story of this painting and how it came to be:

The piece was inspired by an old photo, taken on a vacation out west, which had included a tour of an abandoned 1880s town. One of the toured rooms impressed me, with its forsaken antique sewing machine and frayed wallpaper hinting of better times. Like all my work, Companions II was painted in a realistic style that draws on my studies in atelier painting techniques. I looked at the room from which I drew inspiration for the painting, I was filled with a sense of competing influences: The room had vestiges of a sanctuary (the faded, peeling wallpaper was delicate and charming in its day, carefully selected, no doubt). The sewing machine, a dear acquisition, was used with skill and self-reliance. But now, in its abandonment, the room exuded a sense of emptiness, isolation and desolation. It was these tensions that drew me to the setting.

As I reflected on these tensions, I "saw" a woman - the woman whose room it had been. Perhaps myself (as a matter of fact, I had received a sewing machine as a going-to-high-school present, and had worked used it in my bedroom). It is her sewing machine... and her closet with but one garment hanging in it. The door is absent from the closet... and with it the separation in the passage of time (between the woman's past and her present and future) has been removed. She may have only one useful garment from her past: is that enough to attire her for her future?

I placed her at the window, looking out at the world. But the window necessarily affords a narrowed view of the world - incomplete to its left and right...will she watch the world go by from this room, with its comforts and its barriers -and do nothing about it? Or will she go into the world, and outside the room?

Finally, I put a cat on the bed, gazing at the woman. The cat is another aspect of the woman - often a symbol of feminine power, this cat is ready to animate the woman in another direction, away from the window, presumably out of the room and into the world. The companion cat makes it clear that she is not alone and need not be imprisoned by her past, as long as she has accepts her integrated self.