The fountain of Love (XIII)

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Oil on stretched canvas

Claire Drummond is a painter and educator from Montreal who recently completed her MFA in Painting and Drawing at NSCAD University. She previously completed an MA in Cultural Studies at McGill University specializing in representations of gender and performance in postwar film. Her formal academic training influences her understanding of feminized experience as a microcosm of broader subjective and ecological concerns, and the ways in which her work grapples with what it means to be a woman and what it means to be human today.

She is the recipient of multiple grants and awards, including the Scotia Scholar’s Award from Research Nova Scotia (2022-2023), the Judith Jane Leidl Graduate Fellowship (2023), the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Graduate Scholarship (2018), and she was a finalist for the NSCAD University Student Art Award (2023). She has exhibited her work across Canada and is participating in upcoming solo and group exhibitions in her home country and Europe. Her work is held in national and international private collections.

In Greek Mythology, a bath is always a vessel for transformation. The title of this painting, The Fountain of Love (XIII) borrows from the myth of the Garden of Love. This tale has been explored by painters of almost every era, allegorizing spirituality and eroticism, and centring on the Fountain of Love, from which lovers (typically a man and a woman) drink and fall head over heels for one another. What might it mean for a bath to be a fountain, and for this myth to be re-appropriated to address a woman’s relationship with herself rather than her lover? Taking inspiration from the complex multi-figure 1920 painting Decoration: The Excursion of Nausicaa by Dame Ethel Walker and Bonnard’s halcyon paintings of his wife in the bath, I was interested in the bath as a layered site of play, self-discovery, myth-making and metamorphosis. The Fountain of Love (XIII) envisions a feminine utopia built around the mercurial and ever-mythologized element of water. The figures are loosely inspired by my own form, working with playful and exploratory paint handling in depicting myself 13 times (in the game of Tarot, 13 signifies death or transformation) in different emotional and physical states to reflect how it feels to exist in a feminized body: plural, elusive, expansive and ever-changing.