Cul-de-sac
© Susan Dorothea White
Cul-de-sac, 1972oil with acrylic underpainting on composition board
76 x 122 cm
Collection of the artist
Painted from sketches and my imagination, commenced in my bedroom at 11 Hereford Street, Glebe and completed in the studio at Johnston Street, Annandale
Cul-de-sac is about poverty. It represents a period of hardship, when I was a single mother living in Glebe with three children to support. The woman in the painting was a neighbour in a worse situation than myself — also with 3 children, she was pregnant with a fourth. I saw the family collecting firewood on a cold winter's day; the kids were inadequately dressed, with no shoes and no warm clothes. I emphasised the thinness of their limbs. The mother is serene and walks into a dead-end with head held high in spite of her circumstances. I painted her eyes an unnatural amber colour that glows, to create a focus and a symbol of the will to survive.