Good Girl
Tekst by Gunnar Danbolt
Good Girl
Lillian Presthus works with photo-based painting, a technique that dates back to Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol at the beginning of the 1960s. In Good Girl, she has mounted a child portrait from her father’s collection of family photographs, probably of herself, in front of a patterned background. But it does not look like a photograph at first sight because she has reworked it in a painterly way.
The girl takes up most of the left-hand side of the painting. She has fair hair with a side parting, the look in her eye is intense, but she is not looking at us, she looks to the right. She is dressed in a white blouse and a red skirt with a front breast panel and straps, white tights and black shoes. To her right, we can see part of a horse which almost touches the right-hand edge of the skirt. Only the head, part of the muzzle and a front leg are visible – the rest of the horse falls outside of the picture’s right-hand edge. The horse is painted in a light bluish tone which is fairly close to that which we see on the girl’s left arm and legs. Most likely, we are looking at a rocking horse, even though the eye of the horse looks strikingly alive with its slightly resigned look.
Both the girl and the rocking horses are outlined with pronounced contours in the manner of the early modernists Manet, Cezanne and Matisse. Similar to them, Presthus has not modelled what is found between the contour lines to create volume with the help of light and shadow because there is no consequential use of light here – the lighter areas, for example, the right arm and parts of the left, are made independently of a light source, as was usual in both the Late Middle Ages and Early Modernism.
The background is patterned but slightly irregular. It is made up of rust-red triangles and rhomboids in different sizes and constellations against a white background. This produces a particular effect because the pattern is not integrated so easily into the flatness of the surface, but it has something like flickering facets. In addition, some of these rust-red triangles and rhomboids have fallen off and lie lightly strewn over the olive-green floor. It can almost seem as if the backdrop has become unravelled and is falling to pieces at its lower edge.
