Christine Gentile
Miller
Prompt: For this class we built up to the final, spending most of the semester researching and creating archives, then creating something that had been fully fleshed out.
I painted a portrait of my grandmother, exploring and healing from intergenerational trauma. I read things like The Body Keeps the Score and The Second Sex, and studied painting techniques and ideologies of female artists like Alice Neel, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Frida Khalo. Using this piece to heal from my own intergenerational trauma, I wove motifs into the background that made the piece more personal. Behind my grandmother is a portrait of the Virgin Mary, she looks like a Vulva and reflects the sexual and gendered suppression placed on the women in my family specifically from the religious male family members. (My mother gave me a Virgin Mary statue to reclaim these ideas early last year) The chair that my grandmother is sitting on is not the original chair from the photo, I modeled this one off of a chair that belonged to my ex-partners mother. She became a central female figure in my life when I needed one and she helped me grow into the person I am now. Lastly, the wine glass is overflowing, not only to make not of the alcoholism that runs through my family, but also comment on how our trauma will “spill” onto those surrounding us.
