It's part of a series of paintings I've been doing of stolen Assyrian artifacts -- that one is an object titled "Head of a composite statue of a woman, probably the goddess Inanna, from Eanna, Uruk, Iraq. 3300 BCE. Marble, h. 8 in." Inanna is the goddess of love, war, and sex, and I love that she's lost her eyes and pieces of her nose -- as though there's nothing to see or breathe in the foreign land she's been taken to, trapped behind glass or in storage. I painted her blue because it is the color of protection, and takes her back to her origin when she would have likely been painted. - Esther Elia