Young Girl On Blanket By Ellen Plankey

This painting is by Ellen Plankey, it is untitled and a pastel. For the purposes of this paper, I’ll call it “Young Girl on Blanket”. This is a picture of a young woman sitting on what appears to be a blanket. She’s looking off to her right and is wearing a dark blue skirt and a baby blue cloth around her head as a wrap. She’s topless, but how it’s shadowed only one of her breasts is very prominent; the other blurred by shadow. She’s surrounded by plants, all of which are leafy bushes. The sky in the back peeking through the leaves is a pale orange, almost a faded salmon color. The shadows on her body are splotched from the openings between the leaves. All of which is very soft. “Young Girl on Blanket” uses intermediate colors; soft shades of pink, blue, green and orange. All of the lines are curved in this, even the blankets edge ripples over what appears to be grass, which rounds the edge of it so that it doesn’t seem like a rectangle but instead a boxy oval. The girl’s body is curvy, not overly so, just enough so that her femininity shines through. Also, the only lines that are solid are the outline of her and her
She’s past puberty because her breasts have developed, and by her tilting over you can see that she has a defined waist and hips, so this could be her first experience with someone. Although this could be alluding to an experience, the feel of “Young Girl on Blanket” remains very pure and sweet. This young woman is sitting topless in a field but there is a shy beauty about her, she is shying away, but her slight smirk is endearing. I think that this is what the artist was trying to depict. The young girl is possibly sneaking out with someone and this is her first experience so she’s very shy and coy about it, but at the same time is excited and anticipating what’s to come, which is why she is still smiling