Note:
The golden/ brown figurines in the foreground of the painting are Mycenaean (Greek) figures.
https://joyofmuseums.com/museums/europe/greece-museums/athens-museums/benaki-museum-athens/mycenaean-female-figurines-of-phi-and-psi-type/

Maria:
I didn’t know that the Mycenaean figures from the Benaki museum in Athens were in fact all of women until well into the painting. It was serendipitous when, feeling guilty about using so much pink, and thinking that the undefined stone figures from 1400BC was more macho, (totally naive) I realised that the circles I was painting were breasts and they’re all of women. This fuzz of femininity - interest in subject matter that is related to a woman - simply follows me around. I looked then at my yellow marigold gloves I wear to paint with, how my mother washed the dishes with them.
The women in my life - my English grandmother who wasn’t allowed to go to art school, and my Filipino grandmother who for some unknown reason always wanted my mother to be a doctor. Where do I stand in this arbitrariness? I called it Athens because antiquity floated an invisible timeline over the painting that made me think of stories of different women.