Gold Leaf Portrait Painting, Original Mixed Media Book Page Wall Art, 18x24
Evangeline is an original gold leaf portrait painting and book page collage by independent artist Markus Lewis, made for walls that like a story with their color. A woman glances back over her shoulder, wary and mid-turn, as if someone just said her name.
She is painted over the pages of an old memoir, and the farm-kitchen text runs right through her cheek and throat. It’s the ordinary bookkeeping of a hard life: borrowed supplies, chores, and getting by on credit. Over it, the oil goes on as a thin glaze in the face and thick and smeared in the hair, with oxblood and violet dragged through using a dry brush. The metallic leaf doesn’t sit politely. It crumbles off her shoulder and through her curls like gilt flaking from an old icon, or like rust, and a hairline crack splits her face from brow to chin.
The name comes from Longfellow’s heroine, a woman who spent her life searching for what was taken from her. The painting holds two things that shouldn’t fit together: the gold of a Renaissance Madonna and the ledger of a working life. Every woman made saint-like in a portrait was also somebody keeping accounts and hauling water. The gold is what we remember. The pages are what she lived.
The piece measures 18" x 24" x 1" and combines metallic leaf, book pages, and oil on stretched canvas. It is a one-of-a-kind original and not a print.
