Ethnic Portraits IV
Quote from CohentheWriter on 8. August 2022, 4:46Museum Link: https://app.museumofcryptoart.com/collection/the-permanent-collection?collection=0xfbeef911dc5821886e1dda71586d90ed28174b7d&token=230077&page=4
Source Link: https://knownorigin.io/token/230077
Date Minted: November 5, 2020
Artist Description: I love the world and its diversity. I will try to share this with you in the Ethnic Portraits series. It is fourth of this series and a Native American woman.
CohentheWriter’s Commentary:
I’ll admit, my familiarity with the artist HairofMedusa is from an entirely different type of artwork than what we have before us today. The artist’s more recent pieces, especially those on SuperRare, are ethereal and quite surreal, depicting torturously-posed figures, oftentimes without faces, in dark and shadowy worlds, all smudged with black. These are grim images: faces consumed by red slime, bodies hanging from nooses, and this playing into a juxtaposition with their bright but monochrome bodies, many devoid of features. Coming upon a piece like Ethnic Portraits IV was quite a shock, not because I expected anything less of the artist than extreme talent, but because such intense shifts in subject matter usually preclude intense shifts in personality or otherwise immense growth as a creator. Ethnic Portraits IV was minted less than two years, and while it bears little thematically in common with its artists more recent work, all the building blocks are there: the ability to capture such specific and powerful emotion, the masterful use of blended colors, the maximization of the entire frame. Ethnic Portraits IV is a haunting and objectively beautiful image. This is an artist interested in the idea of a “series,” as well, and the other 8 figures depicted in the series all display the same technical mastery, and all display the artist’s unique gift for harnessing emotion in her works. I’m drawn to so many things in HairofMedusa’s work, and I am as surprised as anyone that they all show up here, so early in her oeuvre with just a glimpse of the fantasy which would emerge in her later works.
Ethnic Portraits IV was composed out of a self-described “love [of] the world and its diversity. I will try to share this with you in the Ethnic Portraits series,” the artist writes. The Native American woman who is central in Ethnic Portraits IV is astounding to me not only because of her specific garb or cultural ornamentation, but because of the universality belying it all. The Native American woman gazes out at us with truly piercing blue eyes, they are bright and yet understated, and even though other colors are bolder —especially the neon feather in the woman’s headdress— it’s the haunting slate-blue of the eyes which strike me first. But perhaps that emerges from the composition of the face, so deft and beautiful; tan and white paint smeared with intersections of black create the appearance of a woman emerging in real time from the canvas. She has great thick eyebrows and a model’s pouting frown, a few teeth apparent from within her downcast mouth. A red band of paint crosses over her eyes, though she is naked from the neck down. The brushstrokes that make up her skin are so singular, however, that it’s worth taking a moment to admire the amount of texture HairofMedusa captures with just the way her brush falls on the canvas. On the woman’s head is a great feathered headdress, a waterfall of blurred color —white and red, predominantly, though it is secured by bright turquoise badges, and culminates in neon feathers of all the rainbow’s colors, though this ultra-bright color is used sparingly, with much restraint. Over the woman’s shoulder, the blurred and darkened and ephemeral form of a bird hovers. It bears a tonal resemblance to a phoenix; perhaps it is an animal familiar. Whether it is real or not is almost besides the point. It hangs in the air without touching the woman, its talons extended. Perhaps it could even be a threat. Though if it is, the complex expression on the woman’s face does not seem to display fear. She is extremely nonchalant, perhaps even disappointed. Is that some profound kind of acceptance I detect? I can’t tell. But that’s the nature of real human expressions; there is so much in them, lifetimes of history and the minutiae of days. And HairofMedusa somehow captures that here too. I am compelled by the woman’s face, but more than that I’m obsessed with its nuance, a nuance that is, and must remain, otherwise unknown to me.
Another note: Look how everything in Ethnic Portraits IV seems to be in a state of downward decay. Colors all flow downward, as if still under thrall of globbed-paint’s gravity. Outside of the woman’s face itself, every brushstroke seems to be pointed south, and with the paint blended together as it is, there are moments where the colors seem to mimic the downward flow of a waterfall, where water seems to change consistency altogether, appearing blurry as it descends. That’s the double-edged sword of the woman appearing to be emerging from out of the paint itself: She equally appears to be submerging back underneath it, as if the black cracks within her skin are erupting and not, as instead implied earlier, healing over, but consuming her —and maybe the swooping bird isn’t so benign after all. It’s in this liminal state that the woman forever remains, forevermore in a state of construction and destruction, erased and defined at the same time. What a fate.
(I’m Jewish. Maybe therein lies the universality I feel.)
Source Link: https://knownorigin.io/token/230077
Date Minted: November 5, 2020
Artist Description: I love the world and its diversity. I will try to share this with you in the Ethnic Portraits series. It is fourth of this series and a Native American woman.
CohentheWriter’s Commentary:
I’ll admit, my familiarity with the artist HairofMedusa is from an entirely different type of artwork than what we have before us today. The artist’s more recent pieces, especially those on SuperRare, are ethereal and quite surreal, depicting torturously-posed figures, oftentimes without faces, in dark and shadowy worlds, all smudged with black. These are grim images: faces consumed by red slime, bodies hanging from nooses, and this playing into a juxtaposition with their bright but monochrome bodies, many devoid of features. Coming upon a piece like Ethnic Portraits IV was quite a shock, not because I expected anything less of the artist than extreme talent, but because such intense shifts in subject matter usually preclude intense shifts in personality or otherwise immense growth as a creator. Ethnic Portraits IV was minted less than two years, and while it bears little thematically in common with its artists more recent work, all the building blocks are there: the ability to capture such specific and powerful emotion, the masterful use of blended colors, the maximization of the entire frame. Ethnic Portraits IV is a haunting and objectively beautiful image. This is an artist interested in the idea of a “series,” as well, and the other 8 figures depicted in the series all display the same technical mastery, and all display the artist’s unique gift for harnessing emotion in her works. I’m drawn to so many things in HairofMedusa’s work, and I am as surprised as anyone that they all show up here, so early in her oeuvre with just a glimpse of the fantasy which would emerge in her later works.
Ethnic Portraits IV was composed out of a self-described “love [of] the world and its diversity. I will try to share this with you in the Ethnic Portraits series,” the artist writes. The Native American woman who is central in Ethnic Portraits IV is astounding to me not only because of her specific garb or cultural ornamentation, but because of the universality belying it all. The Native American woman gazes out at us with truly piercing blue eyes, they are bright and yet understated, and even though other colors are bolder —especially the neon feather in the woman’s headdress— it’s the haunting slate-blue of the eyes which strike me first. But perhaps that emerges from the composition of the face, so deft and beautiful; tan and white paint smeared with intersections of black create the appearance of a woman emerging in real time from the canvas. She has great thick eyebrows and a model’s pouting frown, a few teeth apparent from within her downcast mouth. A red band of paint crosses over her eyes, though she is naked from the neck down. The brushstrokes that make up her skin are so singular, however, that it’s worth taking a moment to admire the amount of texture HairofMedusa captures with just the way her brush falls on the canvas. On the woman’s head is a great feathered headdress, a waterfall of blurred color —white and red, predominantly, though it is secured by bright turquoise badges, and culminates in neon feathers of all the rainbow’s colors, though this ultra-bright color is used sparingly, with much restraint. Over the woman’s shoulder, the blurred and darkened and ephemeral form of a bird hovers. It bears a tonal resemblance to a phoenix; perhaps it is an animal familiar. Whether it is real or not is almost besides the point. It hangs in the air without touching the woman, its talons extended. Perhaps it could even be a threat. Though if it is, the complex expression on the woman’s face does not seem to display fear. She is extremely nonchalant, perhaps even disappointed. Is that some profound kind of acceptance I detect? I can’t tell. But that’s the nature of real human expressions; there is so much in them, lifetimes of history and the minutiae of days. And HairofMedusa somehow captures that here too. I am compelled by the woman’s face, but more than that I’m obsessed with its nuance, a nuance that is, and must remain, otherwise unknown to me.
Another note: Look how everything in Ethnic Portraits IV seems to be in a state of downward decay. Colors all flow downward, as if still under thrall of globbed-paint’s gravity. Outside of the woman’s face itself, every brushstroke seems to be pointed south, and with the paint blended together as it is, there are moments where the colors seem to mimic the downward flow of a waterfall, where water seems to change consistency altogether, appearing blurry as it descends. That’s the double-edged sword of the woman appearing to be emerging from out of the paint itself: She equally appears to be submerging back underneath it, as if the black cracks within her skin are erupting and not, as instead implied earlier, healing over, but consuming her —and maybe the swooping bird isn’t so benign after all. It’s in this liminal state that the woman forever remains, forevermore in a state of construction and destruction, erased and defined at the same time. What a fate.
(I’m Jewish. Maybe therein lies the universality I feel.)