Victoria
I was less and less satisfied with portraiture as I'd been practicing it. For a while there was the excitement of feeling as though I were documenting a scene, but I had exhausted that. I was more and more interested in using symbolism and archetypes, but within the context of portraiture. Many of the paintings in which I first attempted this failed miserably, but there were some high points too.
At the time that I lived above my friend Mott-ly in an old rennovated house, he got a roommate named Vickie Smith. She was a bit younger than we were, a tall brunette who was a little bit spacey, but cool. She and Mott-ly took some photos of themselves in various weird poses around their place. Everyone was big into Joel-Peter Witkin at the time and these things seemed to be in that same sort of just plain weird vein, although these were taken with a Polaroid. The lighting was very dark too. In one photo of Vickie that I liked she was entirely naked, standing in an x-shape, Vitruvian Man pose, on the rim of the bathtub with her hair in her face. It made me think of a crucifixion. In another that I liked of her she was posed in thin lingerie, being a white top and a black slip, a carnival mask, and work boots. I liked this one just because it looked so weird.
Later I wanted to paint Vickie, and I wanted to somehow incorporate these two figures into the painting. I couldn't come up with a good idea of how to use all of it, until one night when I was sitting in my painting room thinking about it and my eyes fell across a depiction of Da Vinci's "Pieta." Since the one seemd to be cruciform to me anyway I decided to work up that sort of a thing.
I think that I should have been more careful in my depiction of the "Pieta," it doesn't relate as easily as it should. The doors in the old house actually did have the rounded tops like the one here. I do think that the painting relates a very strange atmosphere, like something is going on inside of the room that the viewer isn't supposed to see, or that the figure of Vickie outside of the room is hiding from.
The photo of Vickie in the carnival mask and the lingerie did come to influence my later paintings very much. That was the inspiration for my depictions of the "Mary Magdalene" character.