Ghost of Beauty in her Eyes

Geraldine Javier brings the outdoors into an interior space in her painting Ghost of Beauty in Her Eyes, (2009).  A child sits in a carpeted room decorated with floral wallpaper. Her gaze is caught by butterflies that hover above her, their beautiful colours preserved within frames embedded onto the canvas. Her pose is reminiscent of the young girl in Andrew Wyeth’s 1948 painting, Christina’s World. Just like that painting, Javier’s work represents the inner landscape of the mind, a place where the beauty of the natural world calms the soul and sets the imagination in flight.  The work also ponders time and the cycle of life, expressed in the wonder of childhood and the exquisite beauty of insects in death.