Cinderella - portrait

Painted on a warm panel of reddish wood, this figure feels like she belongs to an older world. Rachel Feinstein gives us a young woman with long flowing hair, draped in a simple dress, holding a bundle of bare twigs tied to a tall staff. The way she is rendered, with soft white highlights catching the folds of her clothing and the curves of her face, makes her look almost like a carved wooden sculpture rather than a flat drawing. Her downcast eyes and quiet expression suggest someone lost in thought, perhaps weary from work.

The title points us to Cinderella, and once you know that, the broom-like bundle of sticks makes sense as a nod to her life of sweeping and chores before the fairy tale magic begins. Feinstein is an American artist known for sculpture and installations that often play with fantasy, fairy tales, and a slightly theatrical, old-fashioned charm. Here she borrows the look of Renaissance religious panels, the kind that showed saints carved in wood, and applies it to a storybook heroine. The result is a curious mix of the sacred and the make-believe, treating a familiar fairy tale character with the seriousness usually reserved for holy figures.