Title: | TAC_52B_Lei Queen Fantasia |
Circa: | 1934 |
Size: | 100" x 80" |
Frame Size: | 101" x 81" |
Medium: | Oil on canvas |
The Madge Tennent works form an intact permanent collection and are not for sale. The Tennent Art Foundation made Hawaii Preparatory Academy the custodian of the artist's work to conserve, preserve, and utilize for education in perpetuity. |
"Even the enveloping holoku cannot hide the small wrists, the curled back slender fingers and the columnar arm of even the largest lei woman. Her lifted arms, her wistful smile, the ember-like glow of her sunny flesh, are a perpetual and queenly benediction from one in an honored profession in the Islands possessing the most beautiful people of the world." ~ Madge Tennent
A critic once dubbed Tennent’s work an expression of “rhythm in the round,” an observation emphatically affirmed in this mural-sized painting. Its whirling brushstrokes, colors, and forms enact a ceremonial homage to nostalgic lyricism and mythic proportions. Seven voluptuous lei-makers orbit the majestic central figure, tending to her as they weave plumerias and tuberoses into the fragrant flower strands that have become world-famous symbols of Hawaii. Their eponymous queen seems to spring from the billowy lei encircling her, as if she too is a flower in bloom. She has somehow become the essence of the lei, a corporeal embodiment of aloha.
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