At World’s End 2019

Daria Theodora created this artwork, At World’s End, sometime in the 20th century, using what looks like watercolours. I love the way she's built up the image, layer by layer, allowing the translucent colours to mix and mingle on the page. The surface shimmers. Look at the bottom of the girl's dress. There's an area of colour here that looks like a stained glass window, with overlapping circles and petal-like shapes. It's really beautiful, like a secret garden hidden within the folds of her gown. And the feathers! Some are rendered with incredible detail, each barb and vane meticulously painted, while others are just ghostly outlines, barely there. It's this tension between precision and vagueness that gives the piece its dreamlike quality. This kind of layering reminds me of Arthur Dove, another artist who wasn't afraid to let the paint breathe and find its own way. And like Dove, Theodora invites us to see the world not as a fixed reality, but as an ever-changing, ever-evolving process of becoming.