Black Bough Doll
oil on canvas
77 x 51 cm
2011
Black Bough
A Study in Fragility and Renewal
In Black Bough, a fragile, doll-like figure is caught in the liminal moment between collapse and resurgence. She sprawls across an icy expanse, her limbs bent and twisted in the agonizing attempt to rise — yet she remains tethered to the cold ground beneath her. The floor shimmers with crystalline blues and stark whites, conjuring a landscape both physical and psychological, where isolation, failure, and haunting resilience intertwine.
The painting’s cold luminosity evokes the stark stillness of winter — a metaphor for emotional paralysis and the slow, often painful process of catharsis. Yet amid the frost, subtle fuchsia undertones emerge, whispering the persistent pulse of life beneath the surface, the quiet stirrings of hope and renewal. This delicate interplay between desolation and vitality anchors the work’s emotional complexity.
The title Black Bough gestures toward a rich literary and symbolic tradition, invoking the bough as a site of rupture, loss, and eventual poetic regeneration. It evokes a branch, darkened and bare, yet capable of flowering anew — a metaphor for feminine endurance and transformation. Through this lens, the figure’s fall is not a defeat but an essential phase in a cyclical process of disintegration and reassembly.
Rendered in oil pastels and oil paint on canvas, the work employs a painterly language that draws from contemporary surrealism and mythic figuration. The figure’s doll-like form, poised between vulnerability and strength, becomes a potent symbol of embodied emotional experience — a visual metaphor for the struggle toward self-reclamation amid adversity.
Black Bough will resonate with collectors and curators engaged with themes of emotional realism, symbolic narrative, and the poetic exploration of feminine identity. It stands as a poignant testament to resilience and the delicate, often painful, unfolding of recovery within the frozen spaces of psychological and material being.