“I’ve been reminiscing about my childhood. I grew up in the 1950’s in the hills of Oakland, California. My parents were first generation, ambitious offspring of Jewish immigrants from Hungary and Russia, anxious to take their place as Americans. Though we were comfortably middle-class, there was discord in this idyllic existence. Our family’s culture and traditions were at odds with most of our neighbors. There was constant tension and anger within the family: father/son conflicts, unequal treatment of sons and daughters, and an overwhelming pressure for achievement. It was the period after WW II when many women who had experienced independence in the workplace felt compelled to return to stereotypic roles as homemakers. We could feel the anger and frustration of our mother with constrictions defined later by the Feminist Movement.
“These memories are source material for a series called ‘Paintings from my Second Childhood.’ My intent is to capture a dual consciousness in the work; to paint images I was drawn to as a child while incorporating the experience and jaded awareness of an adult. I create a visual language of geometric shapes, symmetry and positive/negative space to express the drama of this life symbolically. I use simple compositions with flattened color and perspective to express distance in time and problems of memory in patchwork patterns. I borrow techniques and sources that suggest a messy, textured child’s world which include: scraping into media, finger painting, mud pie construction, coloring books, ‘famous paintings’ and comics.
“My Lulu is a variable figure without the mechanical elegance of a comic book character. I use the figure of a modified ‘Little Lulu’ in ‘Who Am I, Anyway?’ as an alter ego. ‘Working Women’ is a tribute to women of my mother’s generation who became my first role models. ‘Sisters’ shows 3 generations of sisters fighting, misunderstanding and allying as friends. I use symmetry to suggest the similarity of their predicaments by forcing of their bodies into triangles with competitive breasts.”
—Carola Penn
