Katherine Hepburn Endures

 

Katherine Hepburn Endures

Epson inkjet print, recently completed

 

 

Katherine Hepburn's beautiful profile and stratostar cheekbones, digitally painted from a publicity portrait.  The background is a checkerboard perspective which references op art.  Using a continuous, mirrored pattern not only gives depth to the picture but also expands outward from the central vanishing point.  The pattern goes in and also expands outward, a trick for the eye, it replicates the movement of breath. 

 

Her celebrity face is transparent, uniting her with the vibrating checkerboard, so that we see her ethereal and eternally breathing.  An everlasting goddess. 

 

Katherine Hepburn made many movies and won four Oscars, a record for most Oscars ever won, that is still intact.  Her mother, a suffragette, raised her to be strong and independent, which imbued her life with unique, independent personality characteristics. She lived to be 93 years old and wrote her own life script until the end.

 

She was in the first film that I ever saw, when I was an impressionable, porous six years old.  The African Queen, with Kate playing a feisty missionary navigating a dangerous African river in a rickety boat, during WWII, with hunky Humphrey Bogart, has stayed with me all my life, humming a theme song in the background of my mind. 

 

 Katherine Hepburn's strength and independence align her with the Greek Goddess Diana. Maybe, she was a human incarnation of the mighty huntress Diana?