Commentary
Who are these women? Who are these women, naked, with their marked skin, inviting our looking, but looking right back at us? Their faces are familiar, but not famous, their poses reminiscent, but we cannot place them. Written on their bodies is the tie that binds them, with their ritual gestures, into a collective identity.
Tina Blondell has created in her women both striking individual characters, but a kind of mythic narrative, as well. These women share a sense of offering, literally of eggs, and of hands cupping space. And they give themselves and their stories as a consolation and a celebration. While retaining their humanity, they have become icons, whose very image can be a balm and a refuge. Like icons, the images embody a power invoked by contemplating their subject’s likeness and the mystery of their lives.
Blondell depicts specific figures such as the goddesses Venus and Diana of Ephesus, and the biblical women Jezebel, Judith, and Mary Magdalen. There are, as well, angels with great red wings, bound for marriage or ready to give birth. Others who are pregnant or holding a child suggest not mythic figures but women of this world. They, along with their fabled counterparts, carry a kind of sacred charge, so that every mother here is the Madonna and every infant a divine arrival.
Blondell’s approach mixes the realms of the sacred and the profane, the ancient and the contemporary, the erotic and the spiritual, so that we begin to intuit that they all share an essential, primordial origin and an ongoing vital presence. Central to this is the pattern that appears on the figures’ skin, both veiling and energizing it. This pattern is made of small spirals linked into a continuous overall field. Both spiral and field suggest water and fertility, the womb and the unwinding of time. On the skin of the figures, the pattern is like a tattoo, a scar, an adornment. All of these readings coalesce into a poetic nexus from which emerges a sense of pain transformed into wisdom, and psychic debt into the beauty of a new self.
Blondell’s paintings are made with a meticulous care that patiently brings its figures into being. Watercolor becomes a seamless medium of infinite gradations and gorgeous ornamentations. Her technique serves as both an act of creation and devotion, her work itself becoming an offering and a challenge. Through these women, it dares us to embrace the depth of our own lives and to live, fearlessly.
– John Mendelsohn
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