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A CROWN OF CHILDREN

A CROWN OF CHILDREN

This is a detail of a large ‘mother and child’ painting that was initially intended to be swapped in to the Zeitz MOCAA to replace the one I originally entered, but then which someone wanted to buy. Upon seeing the initial drawing and underpainting for the new one, decided she wanted the new one instead! This photo shows the ‘in progress’ painting of the mother’s ‘doek’. Eventually, everything…

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Lest We Forget (And Repeat The Past)

I have been keeping an anxiously close eye on the escalating threats and ‘rumors’ of war, and when the pandemic tore the world into two warring factions, I initially blustered in a naive sort of bravery onto the frontline, battling scorn, ridicule, and humiliation from those who clung desperately to the obvious lies with a terror-twisting tenacity that defied logic… Tamara | work in progress |…

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wrote so profoundly about... About a month ago, I chose six women to remember in graphite on canvas. Krysia is finished, and I couldn't decide who to draw next from the remaining five. A week ago, I settled on Tamara Litinskaya who had been haunting me for months since I discovered her photograph that@foxpass-blog

#russia #stalin #treason #theartofwar #warofwords #semantics #ukraine #invasion #bearwitness #courage #bravery #lestweforget

Tamara Litinskaya (1910-1937), student, from the series Ordinary Citizens.

David King, you will remember, is the author of The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia (1997) and several other volumes on Russian topics. This photograph comes from his book Ordinary Citizens: The Victims of Stalin (2003). 

Many of you will pause here because it is an image of a beautiful woman, others will linger because in her expression is a detectable, if unfathomable, emotion. It is the confusion of a betrayal disproportionate to one’s standing in life, the disbelief at the further indignity of bureaucratic formality, a premonition of death. This is inconsolable dread of a person left to contemplate her own imminent doom. Perhaps the people who prepared this file took particular pleasure in watching this young and innocent creature suffer, perhaps they did not care at all. 

Her face came to me as a thumbnail in an Amazon.com suggested search. Oh, the leveling power of the internet. If Litinskaya insists on holding back her tears I will do no such thing. 

Under the photograph is a brief description:

“Born 1910 in Moscow. Non-party member. Student. Arrested 8 February 1937. Sentenced to death on 25 August 1937. The charge: unknown. Shot the same day. Mugshot taken from interrogation files of people arrested on falsified charges during Stalin’s reign.”

This scathing embarrassment for our species we’ve all felt before in those rare moments of introspection that we tried to stifle as quickly as possible. When we first realized that people cooked other people in ovens in sleepy towns. Or hacked them up with machetes in the wilderness. Or pumped them full of rounds in first-grade classrooms. Kurt Vonnegut wrote once in Slaughterhouse Five, "There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.“

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Prudence

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RECENT WORK

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Krystyna

When one can no longer speak openly, portraits of past atrocities will speak louder than words can. Though I suspect those policing the truth with their violent ignorance have turned blind eyes to how the horrors of history are repeating themselves. (Does this render my silent scream for children void?) She was 14. Her name was Krystyna. Her number: 21125.

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PORTRAIT-MAKING VS. TAKING

(First published as a Facebook post here.) As a young girl, my first very serious portrait was of an Amazon tribeswoman. It wasn’t her facial markings, nor her particular beauty, but what her eyes told me…There are two types of portraitists: portrait-takers, and portrait-makers. Placing people inside of a picture by the artist or photographer can ‘capture’ them – and often unfairly, unjustly,…

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'RUTH' | PART 1

‘RUTH’ | PART 1

A few weeks ago I stumbled with great delight across a stupendous treasure trove that combined two of my all-time favourite iconographic passions: very old photographs and medical records – documenting the invisible, subcutaneous world of cells, sinews, bones and muscles, as well as photographs and scientific illustrations of the more curious and confounding conditions of what it means to live in…

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ON THE ROCKS

“A change is as good as a holiday” rang especially true for me this weekend, where my daughter and I left the loudly glittering city behind us with all its digital distractions and relentless pressure to perform, produce, perspire, perform, produce, perspire… and to instead walk into the wide-open peacefulness that is the West Coast, in its humble simplicity and wildly desolate beauty. I needed…

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Just pencil on paper. https://www.instagram.com/p/CUw_WKrqfJd/?utm_medium=tumblr

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The language of flowers... (It's been taking root in my imagination for months now, and late last night, the complete idea burst into bloom in the process of drawing the silhouette of a plump, deep dark red rose on a new canvas...) https://www.instagram.com/p/CUw25ZhqDeC/?utm_medium=tumblr

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Oh, the rabbit hair that floateth in my studio's air and coagulates in my washes... https://www.instagram.com/p/CUvktg0KVDV/?utm_medium=tumblr

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I included this drawing above Prudence's head - in the background- which references Oriol Maspons' post-war photograph. (If you scroll through my feed, there's another drawing of his 'Two Dogs' where I describe more behind this powerful image.) https://www.instagram.com/p/CUuqQmlKL1o/?utm_medium=tumblr

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Detail of the second painting in my Prudence story of portraits... https://www.instagram.com/p/CUupxGQqk6n/?utm_medium=tumblr

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I finished her this morning in the liberating stillness of 2am solitude... (Such a challenging canvas shape!) (at Cape Town, Western Cape) https://www.instagram.com/p/CUupllhqaaO/?utm_medium=tumblr

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Go for gold? Late night painting... https://www.instagram.com/p/CUtJsVSKxqb/?utm_medium=tumblr

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"The devil's in the details." #microscopia #microscopephotography #bubblesbubblesbubbles #microcosm #lunarphotography #moonphotography https://www.instagram.com/p/CUryt35KcrW/?utm_medium=tumblr