38 x 38cm
Miss Angrignon
15" x 15", acrylic, July, 2010

Justyna is a jewel. She's a combination raggedy ann doll, japanese animé, and porcelain doll, all rolled into one. I was bowled over when I saw her for the first time behind the counter of a video store. Yes, a jewel of a face with a wonderful doll-like hairstyle. An artist who sees this combination face and hair and thinks nothing special of it is in the wrong business!

Angrignon station's vertical windows have reddish-orange frames. My original idea was to place her in the middle of one of these window frames to complement her red hair and use the exterior winter scene behind her to enhance her red hair even more, but when I saw these large 10 ft. diameter round concrete windows in the middle of the station, I immediately changed my mind and decided to place her in the center of one of these windows instead.

Placing her in the center of one of these large round windows was a better choice, creatively. It instantly reminded me of those religious, iconic paintings with halos around the subjects' heads. I couldn't resist doing a painting with references to that. It is also the first Subway Series painting to exclude the station name on the back wall.

This painting was created during the year of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics. Canada established a record for the most gold medals by a country in a winter olympics with 14. To commemorate this achievement, I decided to apply miniscule 23.5kt gold leaf specs at strategic places in her hair. The specs are so small that they may not be noticeable at first glance, but rest assured, they are there. This painting has real gold in it!