Description
‘Self-Portrait of a Six-Year-Old’ by Rim Baudey
Artist: Rim Baudey
Title: ‘Self-Portrait of a Six-Year-Old’
Medium: Acrylic on canvas
Dimensions: 28.3″ x 19.6″
Framing: Unframed
Year of Creation: 2024
About the Artwork:
This painting was born from an accumulated memory of many years, when my mother worked in a city maternity hospital as a neonatologist. Neonatologist is a doctor who specializes in premature babies or newborns with high-risk or complex health conditions. It was a hard job with enormous responsibility, night shifts and frequent emergency calls. I grew up hating movies about superheroes, because my superhero had to miss my birthdays to save newborns.
Mom’s morning pancakes, bedtime stories — all were rare glimmers of happiness that gave me a sense of safety in that deep ocean of solitude that forced me to live inside my own mind and create worlds where I felt strangely whole.
Darkest part of this story was not when my mother was leaving for work, it was always when she returned home: I could easily read in her eyes whether they managed to save the newborn or not. Hugging a parent who smells like hospital, pain, despair and tiredness makes you grow up faster. I was haunted by the feeling that everything was fragile.
One night, my mother had to leave for an emergency call, as usual. I woke up to a phone call in the morning and heard a stranger’s voice: “Do you know that your mother died?”. So that you understand how accustomed I was, as a six-year-old child, to reflecting on death, the first reaction and thing I said was “No wonder, with such a job!”. After that I handed the phone to my grandmother. She called my mom in disbelief. It turned out that an error had occurred due to the negligence of the staff — they confused the database of calls for deceased people with the database for doctors who arrived for emergency calls. I remember waiting for my grandmother to go outside, so I could sob into my pillow in the bedroom. I didn’t want anyone to worry and was used to coping with my emotions in isolation, alone.
This painting is a self-portrait of a six year old me. But I think I painted most of the children whose parents work in neonatal emergency care. – Rim Baudey
About the Artist:
(Artist Bio)
Rim Baudey (b.1994) is a Kazakh artist working both in traditional and digital medium. She is currently living and working in France.
Baudey’s work both holds a melancholic and contemplative tone. In subtle monochromatic graphite and digital drawings as well as in acrylic painting, she explores the enigmas of emotional landscapes and human nature.