This painting is a painting about light before it is a painting about anything else, of course: a light so strong that old age cannot face it and youth struggles with its brightness.
It is also a painting about a subject matter that increasingly engages and interests me, and one of contemporary culture’s greatest taboos: ageing and the aged. You may say this painting is about different ages or stages in life: maturity toiling in the field, watched by expectant eager youth, barely registered by the elderly. Its composition forces the viewer to square herself with the only faces that are fully visible and readable in their resigned lassitude: the faces of the elderly man and woman sitting on the foreground.
Its composition also suggests the contrasting horizons of early and late life. The young girl looks ahead, her horizons are as broad and vast as the rolling fields she contemplates behind the safety of the fence. In the elderly man’s gaze the artist has managed to convey the look of someone who has seen this scene many times before and was once the subject of another young child’s gaze as he toiled the land. The young girl’s posture suggests vigour and excitement, the elderly man’s face, merely recognition.
The elderly woman takes us a step further yet: her eyes are no longer with the world around her, but she is no self-inquisitor either. With her all is weight, the weight of the world on the aged, and to suggest that the painter has anchored the plate of food on her lap: food that is neither sensual nor reinvigorating. Food that ensures subsistence from one day to the next only: like the short faltering steps of old age.
A Fistful of Olives 