The Abduction of Time by Ruth Fitton

I have a deep-rooted mistrust of artworks whose subject is a young and attractive female, painted solely to portray those attributes. I wanted to paint a large-scale narrative painting whose heroine was an older woman, full of strength, and beautiful in her own right.

I posed my model looking up towards the skylight in my studio, and fell in love with the haunting way the light reflected off her eyes.

From this pose, the composition for “The Abduction of Time” emerged; a subversive nod to the plethora of Baroque paintings which depict the abduction of young women - beautiful, helpless women, with their faces upturned in horror. In this painting, my strong, older, just as beautiful subject takes charge... recklessly stealing Time itself.

I set the composition in a cloudy outdoor environment, a reference to the Naturalist painters whose works and colour palette I love.

The final painting was fused together from studies made in my studio, and landscape studies made in the wild Moors near my home.