Layers of Meaning

Self-Portraits: creative non-fiction

Sarah McEneaney is a Philadelphia painter who creates "creative non-fiction" paintings of her life and environment. The works are small, and created in egg-tempera, a medium made famous by Andrew Wyeth and also used by the early Renaissance painters. Her images are realistic, in the sense that they are identifiable and use naturalistic colorings. But they are fantasies in the distortion and emotion that they convey. Particularly poignant are the paintings reliving her rape: June 15, 1998 I and June 15, 1998 II

McEneaney says of her work: "I have been painting for over twenty years. My paintings are autobiographical narratives. They describe life experiences, physically and emotionally. I paint looking out from within and back inside from my own particular place in the world. My aim is to be honest and straightforward in the subject matter I choose and in how I paint it, to make the personal universal."

New York Times article Self-Portrait With Epiphany states "Ms. McEneaney's works belong to a prolific tradition of painting that has flourished worldwide for centuries, in blissful ignorance or willful rejection of the vaunted vanishing point of High Renaissance art. It is a longer and wider tradition than that of Western realism, one that has arguably succeeded more consistently at achieving pitch-perfect balances between form and narrative — between the telling and the tale."

With the scale and the liberation of the expressionist realism, Sarah McEneaney's work might be a path of inspiration for fiber artists looking to create representational portraiture.

For those going to Philadelphia for the Art Quilts at the Sedgwick show, McEneaney's paintings will be showing at the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art until April 4, 2004.