lineage
44" x 38"
oil on canvas
angela simione, 2009
she's done! YAY! she's so damn pretty! excuse me while i toot my own tarnished horn but, i love this painting! love, love, LOVE! i'm going to spend the rest of the morning sipping coffee and staring at this canvas.
when i started it - always thinking of anonymity and loss, ya know - i thought about my own history... the history of all the women in my family, really... and realized that "cleaning women" are pretty much invisible. they have no voice, no real power... at least not when they're on the job. i've worked as a maid before. very few of the people whose homes i cleaned even looked at me, let alone spoke to me. you are required to be silent, a ghost moving unseen and unheard through the house... and don't make the client uncomfortable by highlighting your humanity at all...
this painting is made to honor such a lineage- a long, undocumented, "uncomfortable" history that isn't spoken of, the women who handle the messes, who have a relationship with dirt... it isn't polite to speak of such things.
7 comments:
What a painting to honor women. your so right about women who clean, my mother did housekeeping when we were growing up for some of her friends and their daughters always acted like they were better than me and my sister.
This is an absolutely stunning piece!!!!!!
thank you so much heather! :)
This is so beautiful!
When I used to do housework, I was always so weirded out by how oddly intimate I had to get with people's hidden dirt. From washing strangers underwear to scooping out the old sludge from the back of someone's fridge. It's no wonder people don't want to make eye contact with house cleaners, they see the things we try to hide from the world.
hi alanna! nice to hear from you, lovely lady! you make a really good point- i never had to wash anyone's underwear but i did have to scrub dried vomit off this drunk's bathroom floor once. :(
The buttons are so poignant. The buttons just kill me. They are the emotional center of this painting, for me.
xo
ps. I sent you an e-mail about your pc but I think I spaced and sent it to a robot.
thank you so much! i love the buttons too. it was exactly what was missing in the earlier layers of this piece. :)
yay! it arrived! i hope you like it. and yep- the robot ate the email.
Congratulations! I'm not one bit surprised.
Delighted,
Rebecca
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