Description
Margaret Cowan, my great great grandmother's grandmother, lived in the County Down of northern Ireland. Soon after their marriage, her husband left to fight in the Napoleonic Wars. Alone and pregnant, she dreamed one night of a butterfly emerging from her blouse. Soon the room filled with butterflies. She counted twenty-one. Her son, Samuel, had twenty-one children, one of whom was my great great grandmother Sarah. Her husband never returned from the war. It is thought that he died at Waterloo. This painting is an elegy for this ancestor and an affirmation that I came from butterflies. It is painted on a mirror that was covered with gesso, followed by her portrait in sumi and gouache.
