Memory and Dream

The Wild Girl

The wild girl peers out through a gap in the tangled skein of branches that make up the wild rosebush thicket in which she sits. She has an elbow on one knee, her chin cupped in her hand, her head cocked. Her red hair is a bird’s nest of uncombed snarls, falling around her features and spilling over her thin shoulders like a tumble of catted wool. Her features have a pinched, hungry look about them. Her eyes dominate herface and hold in their irises both the faded grey of the late-afternoon sky above the thicket and the pale Alizarin madder of the rose petals that make up the tiny blossoms surrounding her. She is wearing an oversized white dress shirt as a smock, the sleeves rolled up, the collar unbuttoned.

The shirt draws the eye first, its stark whiteness only slightly softened by the echoes of shadow and local color that are reflected across its weave. Then the eye is drawn up, through the tangle of branches and rose blossoms, to the wild girl’s face. She is at once innocent and feral, foolish and wise, preternaturally calm, yet on the verge of some great mad escapade, and it is the consideration of these apparent dichotomies that so entertains the imagination.

It is only afterward, when one’s eye gives a cursory glance to the more abstractly rendered background into which the rosebushes have been worked, that a second figure can be seen. It is no more than a vague shape and is so loosely detailed that it might represent anything. Friend or foe. Ghost or shadow.

Or perhaps the eye has simply created the image, imposing its own expectations upon what is actually nothing more than an abstract background.

The Wild Girl, 1977, oil on canvas, 23 X 30 inches. Collection The Newford Children’s Foundation.