#self directed

These paintings put me in mind of photos I have taken. I’ve been back through my gallery and found some of them. I’ll post them and also use some of them for ideas for my own art.

Don’t know if I’m going off-curriculum already but I don’t care. I’m fascinated by Parrish’s work and want to explore ways to depict light and colour myself. My art skills are extremely limited. It is going to be a massive learning curve.

Cecelia is a Successful Secretary is a textured and arresting work by contemporary artist Dana Robinson. The piece presents a complex deliberation on identity, representation, and the power embedded in visual memory. Robinson’s approach transforms a familiar archetype into something more intricate. Something that feels both nostalgic and newly sharpened. The artist constructs Cecelia through a blend of sophistication, distortion, and abstraction. Her figure is complex and intentionally unsettled, contrasted by a background that maintains a crisp clarity. This contrast becomes part of the work’s language.

Robinson relies on a vibrant palette. One that evokes energy, growth, vitality, innovation, and cheerfulness. The surface of the wood panel reveals her command of texture and material, demonstrating both precision and spontaneity. Created in 2023, the piece is acrylic on wood panel, yet it moves with a similar rhythm of collage and printmaking. Born in Brooklyn, raised in St. Petersburg, FL, and now based again in Brooklyn, Robinson builds a practice rooted in themes of youth, femme identity, ownership, and nostalgia. She works across painting, collage, printmaking, and fabric. A defining element of her practice is her use of vintage Black media, which she reframes through reproduction and alteration. Subsequently, blurring boundaries between past and present, personal memory and cultural archive.

Cecelia reminds me of figures I encountered constantly in media during my youth; women polished, poised, and always composed. They weren’t necessarily women I knew in my own life, yet they shaped my sense of what refinement was supposed to look like. The elegance and regality in Robinson’s depiction stir that old longing: the desire to have witnessed such poise more acutely as a child.