Looking Out, Held In

A woman gazes straight ahead, framed inside a square. The shape is a window — it lets her look out into the distance, and at the same time it holds her in, fixing her within its edges. Freedom and limitation in the same frame, a kind of dual vision.

I'm less interested in portraiture as likeness than in the face as a mask — a way to say something universal rather than to record one person. Contemporary painting allows that freedom with the figure: anatomy treated for emotional truth rather than accuracy, in the spirit of how Picasso reshaped the women he painted.

So this is a portrait that looks back at you and asks what it means to see, and to be confined by the way we see.

An original painting. Signed.

Jolanta