Water Women paintings — Rene' A. Westbrook

Water Women

In 1999, we moved from Glacier Bay National Park in southeast Alaska to the south rim of Grand Canyon National Park. Almost immediately I began painting women and water - women suspended over, in and on the water, people lounging in and around water, and mermaids. I’m not sure if this series was so much a response to moving to the arid red rocks of northern Arizona as it was a delayed response to living in the astonishing Alaskan rainforest. Our daughter Annabelle was a tiny and charming 2 year old for whom everything was magic. The mermaids are really for her, to celebrate her Girl Magic, which 20+ years on, she still possesses in spades. Because this series was semi out of left field for me (although all my work is essentially about Women’s Work, in every sense of the phrase) and felt a little ‘frivolous’, I spent a lot of time researching the origins of the mermaid myth, going down a fascinating rabbit hole with deep dives into the Bible, Homer, Roman and Greek mythology, art history, children’s literature and contemporary feminist fiction. Not frivolous, I learned.