Reflections from the Inside. Viewing Ilana Savdie's Painting Lagrimas y Mocos, Exploiting a Suitable Host

Ilana Savdie's painting titled Lagrimas y Mocos, Exploiting a Suitable Host (Fig. 1), oil, acrylic and beeswax, painted in 2021, creates a visual experience of complexity. This painting was recently part of an exhibit at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (SBMA), titled “Inside and Outside”. As a practising relational psychoanalyst and a docent at the SBMA, I reflect on the experience of viewing Savdie's art.

Savdie's paintings allow me to enter a two-dimensional medium offering an experiential, less organized space-her painting Lagrimas y Mocos provides a dreamy, surreal quality of different felt experiences and thoughts.

As I look at the painting, I see the large canvas and the bold colours of red, blue, green, pink and purple. There is a desire to look more closely. Focusing on the painting-an image of what appears to be a man's head holding up a woman's body-you can see what seems to be a mask on her face; her right breast, arms and limbs blend. Are they hers or his, or are their bodies melding into one? On the far end of the canvas, one can make out what appears to be a giant limb. Is it an animal with a beak whose insides show small creatures, tadpoles and worms? At the bottom of the canvas, one sees a heel and foot outstretched. She appears to have areas of stained and blurred colour, reminding me of Helen Frankenthaler's art-saturated canvas with paint. There are thick brushstrokes of acrylic, oil and beeswax, giving a surreal quality to her work. The combination of the bright fluorescent colours drawing the viewer into the painting is offset with body parts and creatures that have inhabited a body. What emotional experience might Savdie's painting offer from the inside and outside? I suggest we look at it through formulations from a psychoanalytic lens.

Her large canvases offer a visual transitional space to explore-as the British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott us