Magic Twisters and Unsupervised Girls

I’ve had this painting hanging on the wall of my room years. It’s whimsical, fantastical, couture, fairytale-esque. It’s moody and suspenseful; a swirling tornado sweeping up a house in the background, but it’s also flirty and glamorous; a clique of girls in swinging ball gowns walking head first into the tempest. The painting is ‘The Watch’ by Janet Hill.

Hill is a Canadian painter and author whose works whisper stories of gilded girls and nighttime curiosities. Her style captures a classic old Hollywood aesthetic, with subject matter reminiscent of the age of Art Nouveau, and technique which mirrors the precise, detailed and geometrical characteristics of more contemporary abstract realism movements. Every piece is threaded with a distinct narrative quality that encompasses the depth of a long, layered novel; while also being enchantingly ambiguous, leaving every vignette just slightly unsolved.

Janet Hill, The Manse

Many of her illustrations take place in moments of intimacy, such as a despondent woman having a moment alone at the edge of a bed, or an ingenue behind the headlights of an old mustang as it emerges the driveway of a moonlit manor. Her female subjects are characters in her story: captivating, fearless, strange and illusive, rising onto the canvas with stains of complicated pasts and messy memories. In her art collective/ blog, The Mansion Girls, Hill describes her artworks as:

“a visible exploration of the beauty and dread of unsupervised girlhood and the women it created”

Janet Hill, Sylvie and Peridot

‘The Watch’ is the perfect mixture of bizarre and beautiful, and possesses a strong transportive quality for me. The sweeping strokes of the long, golden grass, the billowing swirls of the tulle dresses, the tumultuous green-grey sky above, it draws me into Hill’s dreamscape. The inviting gazes of two of the women in the group make me feel like an omniscient observer of something both exciting and terrible on the cusp of occurring, that in any moment if I’m not paying attention, I might miss. It’s moody, but not scary enough that I would ever want to look away. It’s a scene that I wish I had thought of, a picture I want to write pages and pages of a story about.

I kind of want to be like the girls in Hill’s paintings. Is that such a bad thing to admit? Are they people of good virtue? Who knows. But they’re glamorous, they’re confident, they’re melancholic. And perhaps most importantly, they wear the most divine adornments I have ever seen. Janet if you are reading this, please send me the links.

When I made this arrangement, I had the mischievous girl in mind. I wanted to create something whimsical and pretty, but also strange and eclectic. I had never seen Sedum before, but I knew as soon as I did that it possessed that mossy, foresty, star-like potential that I was going for. I also don’t use Zinnias a lot, but thought the earthy mauve colours were pretty and uncommon. I was taking photos of the arrangement in my room and as I placed it on a stool below my Janet Hill painting, I felt like maybe the fluffy petals of my Lisianthus could be the layers of the girls’ frocks, and maybe the Zinnias could be the moody blades of grass or the pinky-grey roof of the distant house. Maybe the purple Asters could be the gown of the middle girl, maybe the Sedum could be the windswept ground cover, and maybe the unexpectedness of it all was the strange twister lurking in the background of a uniquely beautiful scene.