feminist fairy tale, kiss a toad, princess and the toad, girl with frog, girls with bullfrog, magical frog, magic toad, enchanted prince, enchanted toad, enchanted frog. egg tempera portrait

Ambivalence

  Feminist Fairy Tale Egg Tempera Painting. A young girl contemplates an enchanted frog prince in this examination of the idea that every girl would love to kiss a toad, win a prince, and completely subsume her life in his.  Her face is serious, and the toad’s jewel like eye seems to lead into a…

Elizabethan dress, woman with crystal ball, fortune teller, Elizabethan flower embroidery, red dress, crystal ball, valentine, red haired woman

Seeress of Hearts

The Seeress in her red velvet Elizabethan court dress and ruff reposes in her mossy glade, and shows us our hearts in her crystal ball.  Fantasy flowers modeled on Elizabethan embroidery add to the allegorical feel and make this a little jewel of a painting.  At only 9 x 12 inches, this is a little…

feminist art, sleeping maiden, anti-patriarchy art, cost of being female, woman's reproductive life, pregnancy, fertility, fertile woman, innocent girl, innocent maiden, innocent young woman, feminist painting, biological destiny, moon cycle

In Her Future When She Wakes

Acrylic 18″ x 24″  2016 A maiden in white floats sleeping in a twilight sky.  Above her dreaming and virginal form, moons wax and wane in succession, symbolizing the cycles of her upcoming three or four decades of fertility.  Beneath her mysterious objects grow from a mossy landscape.  On closer inspection we see that these…

Wild Swans Poem, swans flying, patchwork swan, quilted swan, wild swan painting, aerial view of house and fields, Maine swans flying, Edna St. Vincent Millay Wild Swans,

Wild Swans

Acrylic  2017  16″ x 20″ Inspired by Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem of the same name.  The eponymous swans are thrilling, larger than life, their feathers pure as the clouds, freedom made physical.  Meanwhile, down on earth, the landscape seems prettified, pleasantly civilized into a quilt.  Two swans, lower in the sky, made of quilt…

Evening Stars

2016  Acrylic This portrait of a lovely mother and daughter was worked from a small photograph of two people I had never met.  Because of the mother’s star tattoo, I decided to make stars a quiet theme in the piece. I gave the little girl a silver star ring and invented a background sky of…

Lenten Rose

2015  Egg Tempera This is a portrait of a fifteen year old girl with a theme of rebirth and renewal.  The girl is in the early spring of her life, and the lenten roses in the wreath on her head symbolize life coming forth after the winter.

Small Print with a red haired woman in medieval gown sitting in the coils of her dragon friend. They read a red book.

Kate and The Dragon

2015  Watercolor I did this watercolor portrait of my daughter-in-law, Kate, as a present for my son.  Although I seldom paint actual fantasy creatures, I felt that the image of a woman calmly reading while cradled by the immense clawed limbs of a dragon suited the duality of Kate’s scholarly yet valiant personality.

Into My Jungle

2015  Egg Tempera  24″ x 35″ A grey haired woman in a Victorian dress complete with draped bustle and walking parasol sets forth on a path into the jungle that stands as a metaphor for her interior life.  A white bird of paradise flies ahead of her, and a small winged lizard watches from the…