The woman’s skin is the mottled color of the living — the raw silver of untouched skin, the blend of soft pink into the sun-born umber of her bare husk. She is the color of the rock beneath her, the color of the wet and churning sky above. She is the color of the Earth.
Artist Aleah Chapin has made her 2013 painting The Tempest available as a limited edition giclee, a massive 22″ x 22″ print from her 82″ x 82″ original painting. Chapin’s skill with paint and brush is extraordinary and in this piece each stroke is an expression of the machinations within the woman; the muscle and fat, sinew and bone. It is a powerful work exposing the supreme tenderness of the human body, but also its ability to endure. The passage of time strengthens us. Our bodies carry both the scars and the triumphs of life.
In The Tempest, Chapin captures a woman mid-holler — her face caught in a guttural roar against the burgeoning storm, or perhaps a desperate cry for it to begin. She sits on a pedestal as a primordial goddess, creator and seer of the universe. Chapin leaves the woman to stand alone against the growing cyclone around her, yet she is not against the world, but fully within it.
‘The Tempest’ by Aleah Chapin
