A winter idyll from the Dutch figurative painter Nico Vrielink (born 1958 in Reusel, in the southern Netherlands): a woman in a midnight-black gown stands at a balustrade, one hand lifted to her dark hair, while behind her a village sleeps under snow and a single branch breaks improbably into pale blossom. The sitter is no anonymous muse but Jeane Seah — Vrielink's wife and the love of his life, whom he met in Singapore in 1985 and began painting that very day, never once stopping; by now he has rendered her likeness more than four thousand times, an entire lifetime measured out in portraits of the same beloved face. This impression is a limited-edition print, hand-signed and numbered by the artist in pencil. She stands at the very seam between two worlds — the lamplit hush at her back and the frozen blue hush before her — poised forever on a threshold she will neither cross nor retreat from, her raised hand caught in a gesture that could equally be longing or farewell. That stubborn branch of blossom, defying the snow to flower, hangs in the cold like a small rumour of spring, or of feeling, refusing to wait its turn. To know that the woman in the window has been loved and painted four thousand times over only deepens the ache of the scene: here is devotion made visible, a single face held up against the dark and the winter as the one warm thing worth keeping — and the snow falls around her the way years fall around a marriage, softly, endlessly, and without ever once burying the light.
- Medium
- Limited-edition print, hand-signed and numbered by the artist
- Framing
- Very nicely framed (high quality)
- Artwork size
- 780 mm × 560 mm
- Framed size
- 1045 mm × 830 mm
