In My Defense

In a recent exhibition at the Getty museum I saw a little sketch by Rembrandt, showing the master artist and his students carefully observing a model, who is posing on a stage in his studio, and drawing her. It inspired me to create a variation on the theme: I used the same grouping of figures, where the woman is set apart from the rest of them, but changed the environment from a studio to a cave, and the figures from art students to a primitive mob. It brings out some primal emotion in all of them. Here is the watercolor I painted:


While in this painting the woman turns her head away, as if she has no voice, she talked loud and clear in the chapter In My Defense, in my book  Apart From Love. Here is what Anita says:
In my defense I have this to say: When men notice me, when the lusty glint appears in their eyes, which betrays how, in their heads, they're stripping me naked—it's me they accuse of being indecent. Problem is, men notice me all the time.