Two Young Ladies
by Rita Kernn-Larsen
This month’s Fur Cup encounter is with two women who look like trees or two trees that look like women. Better still, in true surrealist style, they are perhaps both women and trees at once.
The Danish surrealist Rita Kernn-Larsen (1904-1998) had a long, productive life, going to Paris in the early 1930s as the student of the Cubist painter Fernand Léger, spending the Second World War in London and her later years in the South of France.
She painted Two Young Ladies in 1939 and forest imagery crops up in other pieces such as another painting of tree-women from 1940, which has the title Women’s Rebellion. You can find out more about Kernn-Larsen here.
I had a lot of fun with her picture Apple recently and you can find that encounter in a previous Fur Cup.
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We live from sprouting acorn to fungus-clothed maturity alongside a multitude of speeded-up, blink-and-you-miss-it human lifespans.
Our lives are slow but full of movement and these are our dancing years when the sap is running and the wind is our lover. We toss our hair, we curl around fences, we rave in the storm and are broken by our revels.
Splitting, we sprout daughters on the leaf-rich earth. The dead wood drops away, and we feel the breeze on our bark, newly woken.
We spread. We speak more loudly each year with the increase of leaves, and our autumns are richer and deeper in colour.
We do not need to prove our strength, for everything in the forest is our creation: we harbour and feed, shelter and conceal.
The tips of our many arms are sensitive to light and moisture, and we have continual inner congress with the deep water beneath our roots. Meanwhile, the secret code of mycelium constantly passes between us.
We are young and crowned with beauty. Birth is easy: a subsidiary thing, for we are concerned with shape, heft, branching, rooting. We are intent on increasing our girth.
With it, our power.