Artist: Elisabeth Ladwig
Title: Tipping the Scales
Medium: Photo Collage on Watercolor Paper
Dimensions: Please Select
Printed on museum-grade, textured fine art paper (100% rag archival). Unframed fine art prints.
18"h x 12"w: Edition of 28
27"h x 18"w: Edition of 17
35" h x 23"w: Edition of 7
54"h x 36"w: Special Edition of 5
"I used to think that achieving balance in my life meant achieving perfect control. I wanted everything to be neat and sorted, everything according to plan. There is a lot of good advice out there: lower your expectations, go with the flow, don't take life so seriously... but how? It's not something you learn in school. I remember when a former yoga instructor of mine would encourage us to sway our branches in tree pose to the point where we lost our balance, to see if we could recover. We laughed. It was fun. And life should be fun, even when we get sidetracked, even when we fail, and especially when we do things that scare us. Life is a balancing act, a pendulum between control and chaos. When we feel ourselves falling, shouldn't we at least try to make a big, silly splash?" Elisabeth Ladwig
"Tipping the Scales" shows an ethereal, dreamlike scene. In it, a young woman stands on one foot atop a precarious stack of smooth, flat stones. The figure, whose back is to the viewer, is wearing a yellow dress and a white ruffled underlayer with ruffled layers. Her hair is long and is blowing gently in the wind. In her outstretched hands, she holds a large, old-fashioned balance scale, with one scale pan on each side of her. The left pan is tipped, seemingly weighted down by a seagull and the sea, while the right pan is elevated in the air, filled with water. The backdrop is a washed-out blue sky with subtle hints of clouds, contributing to the artwork's tranquil and slightly surreal atmosphere. The water below is serene and reflects the sky, creating a sense of a hazy, infinite space. The composition is carefully balanced, much like the stones beneath the girl, with a sense of delicate tension and harmony.