Medicine Lesson 2020

Daria Theodora created "Medicine Lesson" with watercolor and ink; it's like a dream unfolding on paper. The artist is working in a very deliberate way, using a very fine brush to apply washes of watery color in translucent layers, that allow the white of the paper to shine through. Theodora is both drawing and painting at the same time, in that the outlines are created in a linear fashion with thin marks of ink. What I love about these kinds of paintings is that there are many opportunities to mess it up, and so, as a painter, I imagine Theodora is holding her breath, making small marks, and then holding her breath again. What emerges is a kind of visual fantasy that is both dream-like and totally precise. It reminds me a little of the work of Kay Sage, in that it is surreal but also very controlled and elegant. In the end, this becomes a quiet and intimate act of painting which embraces ambiguity and uncertainty, allowing for multiple interpretations and meaning over fixed or definitive readings.