Lady in Red

Painting Description: Lady in Red
Artist: Valeria Notarnicola
Date: February 2025
Medium: Acrylic and oil pastel on canvas
Dimensions: 50 cm x 40 cm

In the Style of Paul Gauguin

In Lady in Red, the artist conjures a vision of serene sensuality and symbolic abundance, steeped in the luminous palette and flattened pictorial space reminiscent of Gauguin’s Tahitian idylls. The composition centers on a golden-haired woman in a flowing red dress, her form stylized and monumental, standing in harmony with the floral and arboreal world that surrounds her.

She does not gaze outward so much as inward, her blue eyes calm, her lips as vivid as her gown. Her raised arm, an elegant and languid gesture, recalls ancient fertility figures—divine yet domestic. Her physicality is not eroticized in the Western sense, but instead idealized, elemental—part of nature rather than apart from it.

Behind her, a white dove perches mid-flight, symbol of peace or spirit, held lightly between her fingers as if it were a passing thought. The vibrant green foliage curves rhythmically around her, filled with life and texture, yet stylized and dreamlike—like the imagined tropics of Gauguin’s spiritual quests.

The floral base—roses in red, yellow, and orange—seems almost too vivid for realism, yet perfect for the symbolic language of color. Red is not merely a dress, but a statement: passion, presence, primal femininity. Her body forms a central axis in the work, a totem of grace framed by nature’s lush geometry.

There is no narrative urgency here. Like Gauguin’s women of the islands, Lady in Red is an eternal figure—outside of time, beyond geography. She invites not action, but reflection: a muse, a goddess, a whisper of paradise lost or imagined.