Etching on her Heart 2019

Jana Brike made "Etching on her Heart" with oil on canvas, and it's like stepping into a dream, right? The surface looks really smooth, and the light has that weird hyper-real quality you get in dreams, but the colours are a bit strange. I can almost feel Brike applying the glazes and the layers, building up the skin tones, and getting that unicorn just so. I wonder if it's all about the act of holding, the tenderness, but there's also that red mark, a gash, a wound on her chest that disrupts the dream. The unicorn's horn is red too. Is it blood? Maybe she was thinking about how vulnerability and strength coexist. It reminds me a bit of Paula Rego, this sense of a story being told, but without all the answers. Painters, we're always borrowing, always in conversation, wrestling with the same old questions. It’s like the painting is a question mark itself, hanging there, shimmering with possibilities, with a strange sort of beauty.