"Winged Victory of Samothrace" (watercolor on paper; 20" x 14")

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The famous ancient Hellenistic Greek statue at the Louvre Museum in Paris was the inspiration for the painting.  The 2nd-century BC marble sculpture of the Greek goddess Nike (Victory) was created to honor a sea battle.  Since 1884, it has been prominently displayed at the Louvre and is one of the most celebrated sculptures in the world.  Although headless, it conveys a sense of action and triumph.  I cannot imagine it with a beautiful woman's head, just as I cannot think of "Venus of Milo" with arms.  The power of imagination!

I visited the museum back in 1997 during a two-week trip to France with my husband. I was awed by the beauty of a chunk of an ancient marble.  I wanted to paint it and paint it well.  It was particularly challenging project.  The reference photo with a flat, interior lighting didn't give me much value variation.

I crumpled a thin piece (90 lb weight) of watercolor paper, which crackled (damaged) the surface.  A sacrilegious act, but I was going for an unfussy way to suggest the marble texture. The background interior of the museum was pained with minimum details, whereas I carefully punched up the statue as much as I could with the same limited palette.  It is a subtle, blue painting, which is curiously alive.  You can almost feel the breeze caused by the fluttering wings of the goddess, which is about to take off!

The painting was juried into the Art League show in Alexandria, VA in 2006.

"At the Louvre" (watercolor, 14" x 20") sold

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I love France.  I love her art, food, language, and way of life.  Many years ago, my husband and I spent two happy weeks in France; on the last day of our trip, we went to the Louvre Museum in Paris as a way of saying "au revoir" to this fabulous country.  It was the middle of March--the college spring break time in America.  We should have guessed.  The museum was mobbed; the long line outside was nothing compared to the crowd in the packed room where "Mona Lisa"--the most famous painting in the world--was housed.  Our eyes were blinded by the hundreds of camera flashes going off simultaneously.

Dazed, we wandered around the huge museum, until we happened upon this artist, busily copying Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres's "La Grande Odalisque."  I am not a big fan of the genre of odalisques, which seems to have titillated generations of male painters and their patrons.  However, the concept and design of the reference photo had always intrigued me and, several years later, I got around to painting "At the Louvre."

You could say that I used a minimalist approach in this painting, with just a bare minimum information to get across the message.  I even had the audacity to leave the shape of the odalisque in the copyist's version totally untouched as pure white paper.  By the way, this is a good way of learning to paint--copying Old Masters' works at museums.  The painting was juried into the Art league show in Alexandria, VA in 2005, and received an award in the Mid-Atlantic Regional Watercolor Exhibition by the Baltimore Watercolor Society in 2006.