“Women I Have Never Known (women i have always known)”

Rose Pearson, acrylic on canvas, 2002, 3’ by 4’



 
 
 

List of women included in the painting (reading left to right, top to bottom)

Modigliani’s “Beatrice Hastings”
Simone Martini’s “Annunciation”
Manet’s “Bar at the Folies-Bergere”
From Mexico: Mayan “The Moon Goddess Ix-chel”
From Ghana “Wooden Akua ba doll”
From Easter Island “Woman Giving Birth”
Klimt’s “The Kiss”
Da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa”
From Austria “Venus of Willendorf”
Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus”
Chagall’s “Double Portrait With Wine Glass”

 
 
 

Commentary


Over the past year, I have been exploring the concept of fertility and the confluence and conflict of feminist and traditional roles and representations of women.  I am especially interested in the impact of fertility and infertility on a woman’s identity and social role, as well as the historical representations of women in Western art and pre-historic indigenous cultures.

Each of these women is unique and particular, her identity, situation and representation unlike any other, and therefore, I have never known her. Each woman is a remnant from history, all I know of her is what I see in these representations, only in what I postulate and project.

And yet, these women, like all women, find themselves cast in roles as objects of desire and as caregivers; their identity and value constructed for them by others in light of their beauty and fertility. Each woman is one aspect of the universal feminine and is  remembered only by these idealized, ornamental representations.  They are both captive to their beauty and empowered by it, constrained by fertility and actualized by it, as I am, and so I have always known them.

 
 
 
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