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Homage Composition
to: Anna Vallayer Coster
(French 1744-1818), Clara
Peeters (Dutch, active
painting 1607-1750),
and Rachel Ruysch
(Dutch 1664-1750), oil on
canvas, 41 x 46"into my head every day, which was so weird because
that usually doesn’t happen,” she explains. Then, in
an almost serendipitous fashion, on another break
from painting she pulled a book from her collection of
art books—Women Artists 1550-1950, a catalog for an
exhibition of the same name—and opened it straight to
Labille-Guiard’s biography, which she began reading.
In particular, she was struck by the story of how the
French artist’s commission for Louis XVIII—a work
that was her largest and took two-and-a-half years to
paint—was torched to the ground.
“That whole story also kind of stuck with me, and
I was coming toward the end of doing the paintings
for my solo exhibition, so I started thinking about the
painting and the book,” Dellosso says. “I thought what
if I did an homage to these women painters from the
book, because I had never even heard of any of them.
I loved doing self-portraits as well, so I thought what
if I paint myself as these women, using my image to
acknowledge them.”
This marked the beginning of Dellosso’s Homage
series. She worked solely on portraits for several years,
then in 2010 began narrative paintings that tell stories
from the artists’ lives. Most recently, she has expanded
to mixed media odes that include poems she has
written and elements of their paintings in the designs.
The Mentor was Dellosso’s first of the narrative
paintings, where she decided to take Labille-Guiard’s
painting from the Met and reverse the concept.
“Instead of having her looking out at the audience,
I have it so we are looking at her from behind and her
two pupils are on the other side. You get a glimpse of
her painting, and it was a spin on her bigger story with
her as a teacher and the significance of that.”
Since then, Dellosso has painted works such as The
Storyteller, Homage to Sophie Gengembre Anderson