Amy Kennedy. Mother Figure. 2025. Acrylic paint on canvas.
The figure in the painting is inspired by the religious iconography of the catholic faith, the virgin Mary. She is holding a baby in her arms and smiling down on it. The baby looks sickly with its skin decaying. On the mothers face I have used tape to cover it, then painted a part of a snake’s face on her. The background is black and red to make the painting grim and express feelings of darkness. There are spider lilies surrounding the mother and the child symbolising death, loss, separation and abandonment. This painting is me expressing what it feels like to be the daughter of a narcissistic mother and how what she did to me impacted me. This is expressing my vulnerability and my inner child that never got the chance to have a normal childhood. On the outside she seems perfect, loving and a symbol of virtue but on the inside she’s neglectful, spiteful, and emotionally unavailable to her child and doesn’t care about the pain she inflicts on it. With my separation from my abusive mother, I’ve had a safe space where I can process my feelings towards her and turn it to an image. At USQ learning new painting techniques helped me to think about my art and ways I can manipulate objects, figures and colours to express emotions with my artistic self. For skin tones, I learnt in Painting content 3, and to make the baby look sickly I used more yellow and blue to get rid of any healthy Pinky tones. This module helped me to make this portrait with more emotional and psychological aspects. Masking techniques from Painting content 5 I used, blocked out the area of the woman’s face for a more precise line and gave the piece an illustrative based approach.
