UTW 22

Chana Bronstein's manicure shop sign in the Warsaw ghetto

Art: 1994
Media: Ink, watercolor, melted candle wax
The drawing is 8 inches H x 21 1/8 W
Framed in a wood frame that I hand-painted images on and the picture frame is mounted on driftwood
Outside dimension: 12 1/8 in. H x 54 W

I drew the wings in my studio. In February 2007 I mounted the framed drawing onto a long piece of driftwood I had picked up from the the shoreline rocks in Seattle’s Myrtle Edwards Park just north of the downtown waterfront.

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The drawing imagery of the sign was inspired by a Warsaw Ghetto photo. Her (Chana Bronstein’s) manicure shop sign pre-dated the Nazis having sealed-in-the-Jewish district that comprised the ghetto into a concentration-death camp for Jewish prisoners.
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I haven't researched what happened to her. If you can read Hebrew, the letters, written in Yiddish, and read from right to left, phonetically spell  man – i – cure  kha - nah bron – steen [the ch of the first name Chana is pronounced with a guttural kh sound akin to that of the Scottish Loch, e.g. Ness,  or the German Johannes BACH).