I painted Mary Lone Bear from an image my sister Jessie had given me, showing her seated with a challenging gaze. I was drawn to the stern solemnity in her young face that was possessed of something familiar to me. I desired to paint her, unflinching, with a blue-green cast to her skin, the feeling of her body being charged with electricity and life. I was at that time, drawn to the idea of reviving long-gone persons and scenes. I had nearly finished the portrait before I tracked down the history of the image and the girl in it.  

The second portrait was painted sometime later, after I had sat with the idea of Mary Lone Bear a long while, and all the human contradictions and era-specific attitudes of the story had run through my mind. I wanted to investigate how the character and the colors associated with her had changed for me over time. In this second portrait, I wanted to create a glowing ultramarine or ultraviolet light resting on her skin and clothes. It’s a kind of underwater feeling, where the light has a physical presence, very softly resting on the folds of her clothes and the contours of her profile. In this image she feels much younger and much more melancholy to me, and I made some of the descriptive marks in her clothing and jewelry with graphite instead of oil.

The particular shade of blue is a magic thing. It’s a color that vibrates, literally — the light waves coming from the ultraviolet portion of the spectrum are the densest, shortest, most active wavelengths. The pigment has a mineral presence — it sits on top of whatever else it’s mixed with. Graphite is a substance that is mined out of the earth, and so also seems to be invested with a little magic. When one works closely with it, one discovers that it is between a soft metallic thing and powdery thing — like the pigments on the wings of moths, that it clings to smooth surfaces in a way that is almost magnetic.

— Becca Mann