The cabbage woman

Some encounters last three seconds and stay with you for a year. My husband and I were in a tuk-tuk, heading to Memphis. I had read every Christian Jacq novel: in my mind, Memphis gleamed with lapis lazuli and turquoise. In reality, ruins. (And the worst guide in the world, but let's move on.)

That's where, not far from the pyramids of Giza, Matt said: "Oh, look at that woman, she could be the subject of an illustration."

I saw her. She was coming out of the market, a basin on her head, big green and white cabbage leaves spilling over the top. Hurry up, a photo before she slips away !!

Why her?

"I can't explain it." This lady had something the others did not. Something that might seem trivial to other people. That evening at the hotel, I already knew what I wanted: "I really had in mind this woman with the cabbages, holding a baby. " I placed a child in her arms, then adorned her with beads I had seen in a museum in Cairo. 

And then came Nout 

It was only back home in France, deep in my books and photos, that everything fell into place. Nout, the goddess of the sky. The one who swallows the sun every evening and brings it back into the world every morning. A mother, in other words. And I had already put a baby in my cabbage woman's arms…

I painted her as a Milky Way unfurled above her, with twelve red circles for the twelve months of the year.

"Cabbage symbolises the earth. And since Nout is always paired with Geb, the god of the Earth, I found it quite symbolic that she carries the cabbages not on the ground but on her head."

When Matt saw the finished sarong, he said: "Wow, what an incredible transformation!"

I will never know her name. She will probably never know she is on a sarong. But there she is, at the centre, beneath the sky.

With love, 
Brescia