Christine is the subject in a series of Expressionist paintings from the late 1950s
The 14 paintings in this gallery, following the lifelike portrait from 1968, were painted all at once sometime in the late 1950s. Smarkusz was in his late thirties and living in Boston when 9 year old Christine's father (V's brother Ed) died in 1956. These sudden examples of "gestural abstraction" are interpreted to be an exercise in catharsis for the artist. The paintings are an experiment in Abstract Expressionism - working quickly using broad bold colorful strokes, interlaced with the fine-line figurative brush drawings of his subject. They also have some characteristics of the Fusionism he was still developing at the time.
