OF ANCIENT GREEK HAIRSTYLES

Untitled

Kim Bach (American)

Allow me to introduce Horrible Mrs. Brown.

For reasons I can’t recall, my friend Muhsine gave her that name when she saw the painting hanging in my Istanbul home. (If there were something horrible about her, would I have bought her from a small gallery in Warwick, New York?)

How I managed to track down her creator years later is quite an interesting story.

I posted the painting on Facebook asking, ‘Does anyone know the artist?’ Gene Rizai, my great long-ago New York personal trainer, quickly responded with a name: Kim Bach. (He’d used Google technology to identify her.) I immediately did my own research, found Kim’s email, and reached out to her.

It turns out this painting is all about hair. Kim kindly explains the connection…

The painting was originally done as part of an exhibition at aRaMoNa Studio in midtown Manhattan, a prestigious hair salon and art gallery in 2004. I was researching the history of hair for the show, and painted a collection of paintings that all had to do with the ancient art of hair styling. The Greeks had quite an extensive history of hair art.

The image is taken from an illustration to a ballad sheet, The Loves of Damon and Sappho (c. 1680) from Ancient Songs and Ballads, collected by the Earl of Oxford (London, 1773). The large partial text is a fragment of the Greek spelling of  'maidenhood' from Sappho's Fragment 114. I painted the image and text in a smudged, dull and worn style that evokes the feeling of fleeting maidenhood, while the perky look of the caricatured image defies the awareness of time passing.

Greeks and their hair. Who knew? Thank you, Kim, for adding to my knowledge of ancient Greece.