Diane Victor 'Like night and day- but not actually'

Charcoal on paper
Diptych
1100mm x 2440mm
Unframed
 
Artists statement:

"This drawing started in a more playful and unplanned way then my work normally does. Given the openness  of  a group show I played with the idea of using two pre-existing life drawing studies  (started earlier at random drawing sessions) and attempted to find a linking narrative to join them.
The similarity  of the two  unrelated poses initially  reminded me of the   contorted figures of day and  night  who sit back to back  seen in Rome at the Medici tomb. Hence  the title. 
But beyond that I allowed  for a playful  visual  narrative to  develop inviting random associations   related to nude male/ female  depictions."
 
This incredibly detailed and thought-provoking drawing showcases Diane Victor’s draw on the visual language of classical mythology to evoke a passage between worlds. The figure of Athena—associated with wisdom, strategy and protection—appears on the woman's shoulder, alongside the imagery of the underworld and its mythological crossing, embodied by the boat and its spectral passenger. The ferry becomes a powerful metaphor for transition: a journey between life and death, knowledge and uncertainty, the tangible and the imagined. Victor’s juxtaposition of the contemporary human figures with these ancient references creates an unsettling, dreamlike space in which past and present, reality and myth, seem to occupy the same moment.