"Battered Woman"
65X50 cm
Oil on cardboard 
 
I was working, as I often do, at home on my large glass table.
Among the sheets of paper and the dust of charcoal, a purple orchid lifted its head above the quiet disorder.
The radio murmured as I drew.
The afternoon drifted on, suspended between the mechanics of habit and the focus of creation.
I had no idea that the familiar purring of the radio would, that day, unsettle me so deeply. Then a voice emerged neutral, almost weary. It announced the death of a battered woman.
This tragedy so terribly common recounted in a flat, professional monotone, slowly tore apart the serene fabric of my working day.
I saw this woman, whom I did not know, in the untouched beauty of her skin.
How can one conceive that she was beaten to the point of agony?
Stretched on the ground, struck again and again.
Suddenly I felt, as a woman, wounded in my own being, as if something within me were being broken.
Rage mingled with the despair of feeling my world as a woman tremble beneath my feet; the fragile dignity of existence revealed itself brutally in the harsh light of the news. And yet, already, the pain was shifting into another realm: it was becoming vision.
The woman of the story was transforming within me.
I saw her as fragile as my orchid in the lengthening daylight.
The mauve-crimson of the flower took on the bloody shade of bruises.
I looked at the blossom where beauty appeared humiliated, broken.
And without meaning to perhaps because I refused to accept that this woman had died my eyes began to alter the orchid’s purplish hue.
It was as if her wounded flesh, in some imagined healing, passed through an entire palette:
violet fading into blue, then sliding toward green, and finally warming into a yellow that foretold the resurrection of the skin.
And beneath my hand, a work was born:
the woman carrying my mingled despair, the shared ache of being alive in this world.
 
Ameneh Moayedi, Paris, 2020-25
(Part of the sale to help women victims of violence)
 
The painting has been exhibited in Paris, Switzerland, and on International Women's Day, the cover design of the magazine. (And of course its series was in Poland and Berlin).