the end of the last unicorn 2015

Jana Brike made this painting of a girl with a unicorn tattoo, likely using oils, but the exact date isn't known. What’s interesting to me is the contrast between the soft, almost hazy realism of the girl's face and the landscape behind her, against the stark, childlike drawing of a unicorn and the words “love forever” on her shoulder. This feels deliberate, like a kind of emotional layering. The paint is applied in thin, translucent layers, giving the piece a dreamlike quality. It feels like she's building up the image slowly, letting each layer dry before adding the next. Look at the unicorn itself; it's drawn with such a casual, almost dismissive hand, yet it carries so much weight. It’s like a memory, a fleeting moment of innocence captured in permanent ink. Brike reminds me a bit of Paula Rego, in the way she uses figurative painting to explore complex emotional states, but Brike’s work has a tenderness, a vulnerability, that is all her own. Art, like love, is forever open to interpretation.