Portrait of Madame W
30"x1.25"36"
2020 led us all into an unintentional race, with no winners.
My husband explained mental illness simply as a distance between two points; some arrive to the end point more quickly than others. W is fast; she ran cross-country on the varsity team at her high school. Extremely inquisitive, hyper intelligent, and an outside of the box thinker (creative), her junior year of high school was lost. W had to focus on a pandemic instead of normal high school milestones. Like many youth, COVID dug its nasty claws into her developing roots, plucked each of her freshly grown leaves, and pulled her violently from the ground. She searched for hope, and help, her odds inevitably stacked against her. W, as I like to call it, is a double whammy, a minority female.
W worked as my studio assistant/model before her mental health, like many illnesses, took a turn for the worse. She is a survivor. She tells her story through her choice in literature, a key part of her identity. We share a love of blue, adequate for a portrait pertaining to depth and struggles of mental health. Having attended the same high school as W along with my own struggles with mental health, and having lost a family member to suicide, we, as the kids say, “Vibed.” Intrigued in my own personal quest of representing the minority figure, W willingly agreed to recreate Singer Sargent’s “Portrait of Madame X”, in her Quinceañera dress, a symbol of the shift to Mexican Woman-hood. W bravely represents women and the extra roles that many were forced to take on due to the pandemic.