Madonnas
A visit to the Convent of St Agnes in Prague in 2017 took me by surprise. The convent houses a famous collection of medieval art from Bohemia. I was ready to pass through quickly, but things turned out differently.
The galleries were full of scores of wooden Madonna statues. I was expecting the usual saintly faces of Mary. Instead these had every kind of expression- whimsical, distraught, ecstatic, resigned, bored, worried, cross. I wandered and took lots of photos.
A few months later I started painting them. As I worked I got a strong feeling that I was trying to let each woman out to tell her story. I kept going until each one was communicating back at me.
I painted straight onto bare plywood with both acrylic and oil paints and sometimes woodstain. I sanded the paint back, and polished with bees wax to show up the grain in the wood. The process became sculptural.
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