Original Image

Water for Gardens

This image fascinated me throughout my childhood. And, when I think about my father‘s work, this is the one that probably stands out the most. There was something majestic and mesmerizing about the stance of this woman and the amazing weight of the jugs poised on her head. The artwork is balanced as carefully as her arrangement of jugs. The artist has signed his name “Glick” across the cloth support ring that holds the jugs on her head. It makes me think he was especially fond of this work not wanting to disturb the background with a signature. The figure is set against an empty sky with a few large palm leaves  (Now faded brown ) that frame  the figure. I’ve chosen to set her in a garden that I’ve taken from one of my paintings and created transparency within her figure to merge the two images. My choice for the title came from recent research of women carrying water on their heads (it is still done today with aluminum jugs). I doubt there would be a surplus of water for a garden in those regions, but it is a wishful thought. On many of my father‘s works for this project, I have taken some liberties with his original paintings, extracting portions from them, changing the color or the scale to make them work within a new composition, but in this case, I’ve left the figure intact as he intended…it is so perfectly beautiful.