The Five Sisters

The Five Sisters, 2011
Acrylic paint, pencil, gold ink, and collage on paper, 30 x 78 inches. Commission for Johns Hopkins Hospital’s Charlotte R. Bloomberg Children’s Center, Baltimore.

In 2011, I was commissioned to make three works on paper for Johns Hopkins Hospital’s Charlotte R. Bloombers Children’s Center, which opened in 2012. The theme for all the artwork for the center was fairy tale. All the artists commissioned to make work were given a number of children’s books and fairy tales to select from, as each work was to be inspired by one.

The Five Sisters was inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid. Each work in the center is accompanied by a plaque explaining what inspired each artist to create the work on view and the plaque for this work reads: “Yet often, in the evening hours, the five sisters would twine their arms around each other, and rise to the surface, in a row.” This sentence is what inspired my collage, as I envisioned the tails of the five mermaids ascending to the ocean’s surface together.

Photograph by John Dean.