Unraveling the Mystery: Historical Women Whose Silent Gazes Hold Secrets
- Mystic Dawn
- 3 hours ago
- 3 min read
Article by Mystic Dawn
From childhood, drawing was my entry point into another world—a private window into imagination where I could dwell safely. As a girl and then a teenager, I would sketch faces and spin whole stories inside them. I didn’t have stability in my external life—growing up in poverty with my mother, navigating the shadows of an abusive and eventually absent father—but I had art. Art was the one place I could feel safe. Yet I didn’t dare pursue it professionally until my thirties. I was terrified of being a “starving artist,” so instead I spent twenty years avoiding my true passions. When I finally entered art school, I did so through overachieving. I chased worth in every direction—high grades, accolades, three degrees—to reassure myself that I was, in fact, “enough.”
There were early successes—group and solo shows, then selling prints to a gallery for $3,000 each. For a moment, I felt like a rising “art star”. I worked at an Artist-run Centre and my world was overflowing with art. And then life shifted again. A move to a larger city where I became a small fish in a large ocean. Grants were impossible to get. Opportunities rare. I eventually quit and took a “real” job. With that decision, I dimmed the flame inside myself and quenched my passions for 20 years.
It wasn’t until I went back to art school three years ago, that my art and creativity were resurrected and with it my passion for life. Since then, I can’t live without creating something every day. If I go too long without making art, I feel edgy, restless—unfulfilled. Art is the way I breathe. Even one hour a day—an art journal page, a sketch, a miniature portrait—grounds me and gives me a safe haven to live my dreams.
I am drawn obsessively to the women of the 17th and 18th centuries. Aristocratic women, often unnamed, whose portraits survive while their voices did not. They stare with a quiet, enigmatic power—Mona Lisa progenies—yet behind their eyes I feel the weight of silences they were forced to carry. Their lives were curated, orchestrated, owned. Their passions were to be embroidered quietly, never spoken aloud.
By painting and reimagining them, I feel as though I am resurrecting them—not as ornaments of history but as women with secrets, desires, rebellions. Some of my portraits hide their eyes behind masks or veils; others reveal only fragments, as though vision itself were a contested space—women’s forbidden knowledge. Through them, I explore the female gaze, how throughout history, women were watched but not permitted to look back, objects of desire—ultimately silenced. My portraits allow them to meet the viewer’s gaze with unapologetic intensity. In painting them, I am attempting to uncover their truths, their mystery. Silent heroines whispering across centuries. I try to give them a voice.
I am especially intrigued by the scandalous ones—women who defied their husbands, and society’s rigid expectations… women who dared to love who they loved, write what they wished, break rules their husbands broke freely. Many paid for their defiance with their lives. I paint them as I imagine how they might have wished to be, alive with inner fire, refusing to shrink. In their stillness, there is resistance. Their silent stares hold many secrets.
Miniature work fascinates me for that same reason. Lover’s Eyes, tiny portraits, handmade books—intimate objects meant not for public consumption but for private devotion. The opposite of modern art’s spectacle. These small creations feel like secrets entrusted to me.
While hardships have shaped me, art remains the way I heal and free my soul. My happiest moments are when I create something from my imagination and feel time dissolve. My hardest moments? Feeling like sometimes I am those women, silenced, unseen. But even those experiences refine my resilience and fuel my passion to do more, create more, BE more, unapologetically, without fear of what others may think. I no longer try to overachieve. I am what I am, perfectly imperfect.
My advice to fellow artists is simple: follow your passion, and never let others take your dream away. If you truly want this path, you can succeed. Persistence is its own form of devotion.
Right now, I’m continuing my portrait series—these resurrected women who refuse to stay quiet. I’m building new miniature collections, new masked gazes, new stories. Each painting is another attempt to uncover a mystery, to give voice to someone history tried to silence.
And somewhere in all of this, I am still drawing the same faces I imagined as a child—only now I understand why they came to me, still come to me, all these years later.
Website : http://mysticdawn.art
Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/mystic.dawn.art/
