Picture of the Month for September 2023 is Red Haired Madonna by Lou Jessop It was chosen from the Members Gallery by Carole Stephens who says:

I’m choosing as my Picture of the Month Red Haired Madonna by Lou Jessop.

I have always loved Lou’s extraordinary work. It is erudite but also deeply personal. 

Her sources are wide, literate, evoking many cultures and eras.

But this particular piece shows a mother and child in a fiercely tender embrace, reminiscent of a medieval icon but so new with its interlocking shapes and luscious curves. The shapes of freely drawn, caring hands are echoed in the plants which curve around the figures, glimpsed on a dark mysterious ground, inside a beautiful, decorated arch. A stunning, honest evocation of motherhood.

Remarkably, this tender piece is made in recycled knitwear, the drawn lines made by hand stitching. As Lou herself says ‘in a collision of pattern and pictorial elements’.