Looking to the Past by Mary Ellis LaGarde
I fininshed my first painting in the new studio in Naples. It is entitled “Looking to the Past”. It is a portrait of a young Native-American girl who was participating in a pow-wow ceremony in Houston. I was struck by her appearance. She was facing West and squinting into the sunset while all her tribal elders were looking East towards the arena where the ceremony was taking place. In a sense, painting her in the classical style is my own form of looking to the past. It would be easy and quick for me to paint an abstract version of the scene but I could only do her justice by painting her in the detailed and time-consuming classical Venetian method.
