Women and Easel

Notes

"For some years after graduating from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki, Karin Jaroszynska assumed the ancillary role of wife and mother and it was only in the latter half of the 1960s that she re-engaged in art full-time. This image is perhaps a wry comment on this dual existence. The women in this work are dressed in the manner of European peasants and the relaxed composure of the woman with the dog is reminiscent of the comfortable comportment of Pieter Breughel's folk. It is difficult not to read the painting as a double self-portrait, the artist representing two different aspects of self, the domestically ensconced figure on the right, curious and perhaps slightly bemused at the strained attentiveness of her 'other' self, the aesthetic labourer, on the left."¹

¹Michael Stevenson (ed) (2001) Michael Stevenson (ed) (2001) Works From A Private Collection of Contemporary South African Art on Permanent Loan to The Chancellor Oppenheimer Library, University of Cape Town, Cape Town: University of Cape Town, unpaginated.

Literature

Michael Stevenson (ed) (2001) Michael Stevenson (ed) (2001) Works From A Private Collection of Contemporary South African Art on Permanent Loan to The Chancellor Oppenheimer Library, University of Cape Town, illustrated in black and white, unpaginated, cat. no. 16.

Provenance

Property of a Gentleman.