The Beginning And The End 2021

Camilla d'Errico painted this, titled "The Beginning And The End", sometime in the 20th century, and it really makes me think about artmaking as a transformative process. The painting has this dreamy, almost ethereal quality, right? It's all in the way d’Errico handles the paint – thin layers, blended so smoothly it’s like looking at a pastel drawing. The texture is so soft. This smoothness gives it a surreal, airbrushed feel, like a digital painting rendered by hand. Notice that snake draped around her head? Look at how the light catches its scales. The artist uses subtle shifts in tone, a touch of white here, a shadow there, to bring it to life. This feels adjacent to the work of Mark Ryden, who builds similarly uncanny worlds with painstaking detail and a candy-coated palette, but d'Errico's style is distinctly her own, embracing a certain manga-influenced cuteness. All of which to say, art’s an ongoing conversation, always shifting, always surprising.