This portrait was developed across many sessions over several months — the subject has a quality of stillness and self-possession that takes time to understand in paint. The background was kept deliberately neutral to direct full attention toward the face and hands, which carry the most worked surface in the painting.
The hands were the last thing resolved and remained difficult throughout — not technically but emotionally. They are her mother's hands, and that knowledge put pressure on every mark in a way that the face, somehow, did not.
About the artist
Diana Moldovan's portrait practice is built on sustained observation and an insistence on slowness — she spends more time looking than painting, and the works that result carry the weight of that attention. Figures are rendered with psychological presence as well as physical likeness, and the backgrounds are treated with the same care as the faces, because a person's surroundings are also a kind of portrait.
She has worked as a portrait commissionaire for private clients and institutions across Romania for fifteen years, and her studio practice runs alongside that commissioned work as a place to take risks on her own terms. She accepts commissions.
