«Being Maria Callas» Painting by Martina Rall

Art Description

Painting: Acrylic on Canvas and Wood.

Acrylic colors & pastels on canvas print
Hand signed by the Artist

This painting is part of my series "Being Marilyn Monroe. Icon Portraits.", a series of self-portraits reflecting and expressing my admiration for and my identification with inspiring modern day icons such as Marilyn Monroe, Frida Kahlo, Audrey Hepburn, Maria Callas, Romy Schneider, Michael Jackson, Grace Kelly and Niki de Saint Phalle.

"La Divina" Maria Callas was an artist through and through. I admire her for her absolute dedication to art and love. She was working very hard. From youth up Maria lived exclusively for the opera. She wanted to become the greatest soprano singer in the world, and she did and she was until she met Aristotle Onassis. From that moment on, Maria the singer became Maria the woman. Her love for Onassis was true, deep, absolute and full of passion, like her performance in art. When Onassis married Jackie Kennedy, Maria became a broken woman. She even lost her voice. Her last years she passed lonesome in her appartement in Paris where she died at 54, only shortly after Onassis' death.

My icon self-portrait series is influenced by the work of surrealist female artists like Frida Kahlo and Niki de Saint Phalle as well as by Italian author Luigi Pirandello's post-modernist approach on identity theory. And it is based on a series of coincidences, that brought me to explore and re-think the inherent nature of portraying providing a practical meaning to the American poet William Carlos Williams' quote: «The artist is always and forever painting only one thing: a self-portrait».

Keywords: Purple, Text, Typography, Woman, Self-portrait, Celebrity, Pastel Colors, Maria Callas, Unique Copy, Music, Notes, Opera

Subjects: Pop Culture/Celebrity

Styles: Pop Art, Portraiture, Photorealism

Mediums: Acrylic

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