A Swan is Still a Widow

The gesture of the figure in this piece is based on the woman in the painting "Lemminkainen's Mother" by Akseli-Gallen Kallela. The mother is mourning the death of her child Lemminkainen, looking up to face God diffidently and reproaching him for taking away her son. In this depiction, Lemminkainen's body is nowhere to be found, only his warped head floating away from the mother's hand. Similarly, the woman's white veil is balanced precariously on her head and seems to be falling off. Most importantly, she no longer looks up to reproach God but straight forward, straight at us. The title is an allusion to the singular swan pictured in the far left corner of the original painting by Kalella. It is also an implication of the mother's newfound loneliness. This 'contemporary' mother of Lemminkainen is no longer held in her grief by the conceptual richness of Symbolist painting. The modern age has torn away symbolic and ritual value, hence she is surrounded by a vague and ominous indiscernible cloud of blacks, reds, and blues. That is to say, this is a Symbolist painting without any symbolism. I painted this piece from direct observation of a person named Assia. I used a combination of matte and glossy oil paints for the background in order to create the appearance of an uneven texture.