In November of 2022, I read an article in the New York Times about the 17th Century Flemish female artist Michaelina Wautier who had not received much attention and whose work was attributed to men or forgotten for centuries until and Art historian Katlijne Van der Stighelen, a professor of art history at the University of Leuven in Belgium, first encountered her work in 1993 in the storage area of a Vienna museum. Wautier painted “The Five Senses” , a series of five paintings that show youths experiencing sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch, with each painting named for the sense it depicts. The series was only re-attributed to Wautier in recent years. I was struck by the concept of the series and thought that I would attempt a similar project using instead of Youths, older adults. Each would follow the format of my recent portraits. horizontal format and focus on the facial features and hand and radical cropping .
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