The Agony and Ecstasy

The Colour Collection: White

"The Agony and Ecstasy" is the eighth Spirit Painting in the "Colour Collection", a series of nine paintings each based upon a single colour in the Colour Wheel (Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Violet) plus Black, White, and Brown.

This painting, representing the colour White, shows the marble Gian Lorenzo Bernini funerary monument of Ludovica Albertoni, a wealthy 17th Century Roman noblewoman who, when her husband died, was forced to enter a Convent where she spent the rest of her life in the service of God tending to the poor. A young red-headed woman wearing a French Blue shawl is seated in front of the transparent textile draped sarcophagus holding a white egg.

While Bernini intended his statue to represent the moment of ecstasy when Ludovica met her God, the painting itself means many things to many people. Some view it with Catholic overtones. Some see it as a representation of fertility, of life recurring, of the pain of childbirth, of a Mother/Daughter extension of life, and more. Explanation, and interpretation, is in the eye of the individual viewer, however...the artist's intent is entirely different in that, to her, the painting represents every art student's agony of, at some point, being forced to paint the repetitive values of white textiles and clothing during their art school studies, and then, being instructed to paint a single white egg, all in an investigation to determine that there is not, in fact, white in any white object. Thus, while the viewer sees many things, this painting is a personal representation of the artist's true agony and ecstasy from her classical art school training.