Broken Thought

My name is Alisa Duda and my piece is titled Broken Thought. It's a portrait of a young woman's face that fills the whole space of this ten by ten inches, or oil painting. The pale face is framed on both sides with black, wavy hair, and her big, beautiful, dreamy eyes are looking slightly to the right. Her eyebrows are green, which is the brightest color in otherwise white, black, and dark blue color scheme. 

She's wearing a pearl tiara, but one of the first things the viewer will see is her mouth. Or more precisely, lack of it. Instead, there's a big black hole with sharp edges and chipped paint. From far, it might look like her mouth is wide open and she's screaming. But upon the closer inspection, it's apparent that it's not a human face, but a broken ceramic mask. There are a few smaller holes in this mask, and many connecting cracks which wept the whole face. One crack goes directly through her left eye, making her dreamy look seem so expressionless and juxtaposing to the state that we see her in. 

I called this painting Broken Thought because maybe she is interrupted and lost in her train of thought, and maybe she is trying to mask it. As an artist, I'm mostly interested in technique and composition. I had fun painting the light in the pearl tiara, chipped paint in the cracks and blue highlights in her hair. But the most fun was to paint her blue, hyper realistic, shiny, full of life eyes with big black eyelashes and with the magic of art. Put the hair thing crack right through it. 

My hope is that the viewer will see the loud conversation from far, but will be drawn in and paused to identify the impossible question. Is a young woman alive? Is this really just a mask, or is it just a painting that makes you think? I'll add another small detail here and say that originally she had mouth underneath the mask, but it wasn't working for me compositionally, so I painted the whole in black. But if you look really, really closely inside the black hole, you can still see her teeth.