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her whimsy and her love of beauty.
The texture of the paper that carries the picture makes a soft and appealing surface to look at. “Punch and Judy” is a vibrant work, appropriate to its subject.
I would have liked it more if the strong, swirling lines of Judy’s pink sleeve in the foreground had been modified to attract less attention.
The closer I look at Robin Purnell’s “Catwoman,” painted in St. Petersburg where Robin lived for three years, the more I find to think about and question. This somber study of a poor, old woman who cares for cats shows a sensitive, sad person, pained and lonely. Four nondescript cats are the recipients of her charity, indicated by two fish placed on the floor in the foreground.
This primarily bronze-colored picture has the finish of a Russian icon and the background is interestingly carried over to cover the frame.
An image like this symbolizes for me the terrible suffering that people of this woman’s age in the USSR have endured, going back to the revolution that brought the Communists to power at the end of the First World War. Although she wears a fur coat and hat, the woman has probably never experienced a good time in her life.
She may be the lone survivor of her family. Even the end of Communism is of little or no benefit to her.
Purnell’s meticulous realism, selectively presented, conveys a timeless quality that assures us of symbolic meanings, most of which we need to invent for ourselves.
The small space the woman
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