A young woman gazes into the distance on a cliff above blue waters. Four eagles fly hard in the sky coming towards her. This work is constructed from two attached pieces of wood with total dimensions of 12 inches by 22 inches. The sky and land are hot orange and a turquoise sea and small beach are seen below the cliff. A bright sunrise is coming up in the background behind a shadowy still dark mountain. It’s an otherworldly and somewhat hellish landscape relieved by the beauty of the woman, the water and the magnificently plumed birds.
The woman in the painting is the grown-up version of Little Zazulia. My grandfather made up fairy tales to entertain my sister and I when we were children. One was the story of a young girl who he named Little Zazulia who was plucked off the ground and carried away to an island by a large bird. My older sister remembers the story as a benign tale with a happy ending. I remember it as a tale similar to Grimm’s fairy tales which often had disturbing aspects. I wasn’t that happy about the idea of being carried off by a bird. The “Where Are They Now?” television shows and articles always held a fascination for me. It’s interesting to learn about the unexpected twists and turns of famous lives and how they came to be where they are today. I wondered where Little Zazulia would be now if she had never been delivered back to her home and grew up on an island with the birds?
I chose eagles for the kind of birds that might have adopted and raised Zazulia to adulthood because I had become absorbed for a while watching a webcam trained on a live eagle’s nest. The female eagle was tirelessly nesting on eggs in spite of extremely severe weather. I was also inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s painting “Lady With An Ermine”. The model bore some resemblance to the lady in his painting and I liked the sleek-headed coiffure known as a “coazone” that she wears in the painting. I translated it into a cap to emphasize the silhouette of her face and give her some resemblance to photos of Amelia Earhart who possibly crashed her last flight on a remote island and disappeared.
The eagles in the painting look friendly or menacing depending on the viewer’s own associations. The woman might be leading the flock of eagles or perhaps she is about to be attacked by them. They are rushing towards her with talons extended but whether to protect or attack is open to interpretation. The largest eagle fades into black and white as it transitions into a different dimension, the reality in her own thoughts. Zazulia, no longer little, looks out on the world with an open gaze. Her present day circumstances might mirror our own currently uneasy relationship with the natural world and the solitary task we all have to define our place in it.
Where Are They Now? – Little Zazulia by Ellen Chadwick, oil on panel, 6″x22″, 2023, in collection of the artist.