"Displaying the same technical mastery of your techniques and tools evident throughout your Facebook faces, this latest profile picture strikes me as multi-layered, mysterious and resonant. It has become one of my favourites in the impressive series. Of course everyone sees what they see when studying your portraits, and like the others this picture elicits a multitude of responses.Emerging from depths and shadows as if self-created out of a black matrix or nebulous primordial pool, the head and face are essentially covered, and the covering is both costume and meaning. The shoulders of delicate strength are bathed in light. The dark, oversize glasses obscuring the eyes suggest a celebrity seeking disguise, or possibly criminal character, an ironic modesty in the hidden, seemingly lowered gaze, or simultaneously aristocratic hauteur and indifference to the public, also sexual provocation and dark eroticism, intimations of animal ferocity, quiescent passion, or meditation and reverie which the public cannot enter.
The psychology of the artist is not the issue here. Almost insect-like, here is something or someone either pausing, or waiting for the next stage of development, poised to burst out of stillness, just freshly released from the chrysalis fixed to a silky black, shimmering background.
In addition I see a kind of alternate spirituality and authority born of the shadows. Lacking the veil portion, the headband puts me in mind not only of a swimmer’s tight cap suppressing luxuriance, but also of novitiates of Eastern Orthodox churches who wear the apostolnik or a black scarf to hide their hair.
This particular image depicts a subtle drama involving light and shadows reminiscent of Italian Renaissance painters to some degree, for the chiaroscuro reveals inherent oppositions of meaning, artistic intent insofar as we can understand them, and individual reactions to complex and powerful serenity. An interesting work to say the least."
- Kenneth Radu
Kenneth Radu is the author of a dozen books, including story collections, novels, poetry, and one memoir. His first collection of short fiction, The Cost of Living, was nominated for the Governor General’s Award. He has twice won the Quebec Writers’ Federation Best English-Language fiction award for A Private Performance and Distant Relations. His work has also been shortlisted for the Books in Canada First Novel Award and the Journey Prize. In the spring of 2010, DC Books (Canada) published his latest book, Sex in Russia: New & Selected Stories.
