Date: 2013
Medium: oil on canvas
Dimensions: 60 × 60 cm (unframed)
The Story Behind the Painting
One day, the artist suddenly recognised in a living peony the expression on her grandmother’s face in an old post-war wedding photograph. In the black-and-white photograph, her grandmother sat beside the bridegroom, wearing a black dress, without a veil or bouquet, her head slightly inclined. In that barely perceptible tilt of the head, in that particular expression, the artist recognised with extraordinary certainty someone she had known and loved since childhood.
She had already finished painting for the day and had no intention of picking up her brushes again. But the recognition was so sudden and powerful that she put everything else aside and began to paint at once. She works exclusively from life, and the expression of the living flower could change at any moment.
A few years after the wedding, her grandmother suddenly left the capital with her two-year-old son, leaving her husband behind. They never lived together again, although they continued to love one another. Why she left remained unknown.