Isabel • 14 • Wicklow

12-15 Category   •  2024
During a visit to the Brera in Milan with my family in January, I was walking through the gallery and I felt that the people in the paintings wanted to burst out an live and move and be free and happy. They were so alive to me as I looked at them. I thought they were looking back at me and at all the other people in the gallery. This is what I tried to recreate at home, a person emerging free from the ‘cage’ they had been painted into hundreds of years ago. I began by looking at the sketches that I made at the Brera. I drew a new sketch, then used acrylics and then I modelled the fingers on my own, using clay. I positioned the hands as if they were emerging from behind the picture and pulling and pushing to get free. I painted the fingers white, rather than skin colours, because I wanted the people in the painting to emerge as painted figures, not humans. It is the art that springs to life, not becomes human, but is living art.