A Prayer 2019

Daria Theodora’s 'A Prayer' is a watercolour painting, and the translucence of the medium gives it a luminous quality. It’s all about layering and letting colours mix and mingle. The skin tones of the woman praying are achieved through subtle washes of pink and grey, with the colours bleeding softly into one another, which creates a sense of depth and volume. The surrounding foliage, however, has a different quality: The colours here are more vivid, more saturated, as if the artist is revelling in the act of applying pigment to paper. Look at the lower left, where the artist has built up a complex network of flower petals. There is a kind of joyousness about the whole thing; like the art of someone like Hilma af Klint, Theodora’s piece feels spiritually charged, a kind of visual mantra, one that embraces the power of ambiguity and multiple interpretations over any fixed meaning.