Mary
© 1989
Media: oil on canvas with paper map
Location: in a collection
60 x 56 inches
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For those of you with low vision:
This painting is a square divided into three panels: a large rectangle above two small rectangles, side-by-side. The large panel dominates with it's dark cobalt blue color, a head-on view of a wall at night that has a blue wallpaper patterned with rows of pale stars. Diagonally stretched across the wall is the light cast from a window with gauzy curtains billowing in a breeze. The clue that it's a wall is the faint image of a light switch on the far left, covered in the same wallpaper, and a pale lampshade in the lower right corner that stands in front of the window's light and catches a sliver of that light wrapped around its curve.
Beneath this image are two lighter images, so similar in off-white, beige, and light blue tones that they almost read as one wide image. On the right side, the larger of the two panels shows a topographical map of Italy and the Alps north of it, with a rectangular legend in the corner headlined "Italia." The light cyan blue shapes of the Adriatic and Tyrrhenian Seas embrace the peninsula of Italy at almost the identical diagonal as the window highlight in the image above. Lying on top of the peninsula at angles that echo those above are a U.S. passport under an opened pack of Gauloises cigarettes. The passport is a blue slightly darker than the wall above, and the Gauloises package is a blue nearly matching the window highlight.
To the left, the other panel shows a girl posing with a smile in front of a robust sycamore tree with a train station and a range of snow-tipped mountains in the background… what would pass for a tourist vacation snapshot. The girl is wearing a deep blue coat and hat that almost match the color of the passport. She is holding what might be a white snowsuit over one arm whose shape echoes the white rectangle of the legend in the panel to the right. The dark shapes of the girl, the tall tree, and the train station roof form an abstract diagonal arrow that points at the dark spot of the passport in the next panel, adding to the overall composition with the diagonals of the panel above.
