"The daughter of man"

(oil painting on canvas, 24X36, 2008)

"Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see."
Rene Magritte

"The deepest experience of the creator is feminine, for it is experience of receiving and bearing."
Rainer Maria Rilke

"What a strange thing man is; and what a stranger thing woman."
Lord Byron

“The daughter of man” is not a self-portrait per se. My original intention was to create a painting that represents a ‘generic’ Western woman. Unabashedly flawed and uninhibited, I envisioned her as an antipode to Magritte’s rigid and faceless ‘son of man’. However, since I had a particular facial expression in mind, (a cross between Mona Lisa’s mysterious smile and a smirk of an all-knowing modern woman), I ended up using the first available face that was capable of making such an expression, which happened to be my own.

A few months past after the completion of my creation, when I happened to discover that ‘The Son of Man”, (Magritte’s painting that inspired mine), was actually painted as the artist’s self-portrait, a fact that I found rather amusing…