Cressida's Transformations - art and photography

A GIRL NAMED FLOSS   Click here to return

   I looked at the lady who had shown interest in Floss and said no more while I waited for a sign that she would like me to continue. I did not want to bore her. She kept her eyes on the portrait.

   "Tell me more about her," the lady said.

   I told her Floss was a complex personality - there were many facets to her. She was passionate, secretive and volatile. When I needed to include all these emotions and more in her portrait I had to devise some way of doing it.

  A yashmak seemed appropriate. Floss always seemed to try to hide from the world that had caused her so much pain for being Eurasian so in her portrait she is seen hiding behind the yashmak and only her eyes are visible.

"How did you do it? How did you get this effect?" the lady asked.

  I explained that I arranged a large piece of fabric into the shape of a yashmak. Within the arrangement, there were many shapes and I used these to convey different emotions. The arrangement was photographed. The photographic print was painted - the shapes in different colours for different emotions - then a photograph of eyes was superimposed. Voila! Here you see it, I said to her, a woman wearing a yashmak.

  She thought about it then pointed to one shape in the portrait and said, "So this swish here," she moved her finger swiftly over a shape, "means, what?"
  "Her volatility."
  "And this one here?" she asked pointing to a more gentle shape painted in pale pink, that she slowly traced with her finger.
"Her compassion," I replied.

  I thought she needed more explanation about my work so I told her how one reviewer saw it:'The merging of inner and outer landscapes into bold and vibrantimages'.

  She made no comment but asked me what happened to the beautiful Eurasian girl who had lived in Singapore many years before in another era, an era before Independence. I told her I heard that after many years of trying, she was eventually given Australian citizenship. I do not know where in Australia she went to live or if she found happiness. 

 As I left the Tanglin Club I thought how Floss would have laughed if she had known that I had been a guest there and that her portrait was being gazed upon. Long-past prejudices against both of us still lingered in my mind. This night I felt we were both intruders into a place we did not belong. Floss in the form of a portrait and I in the form of a woman who remembered a time when she was young and lowly on the English social scale. We were both part of another era.