The Blue Ghost This painting, begun in 1976, represented both an entirely new direction in oil painting for Samizu and – unbeknownst to her at the time - the close of her professional painting career. In this work she manifests a line in a Russian poem by Esunin. In that poem he said “Blue Ghost! Neither here nor there.” Samizu wrote:
"The painting depict some aspects of upper class bourgeois life which was then my environment. The mirror behind the central figure reflects finer things of the past.The left side of the painting represents the past, the center is the present, while the right side and the bottom, the future.The giant compass divides things of the past from those of the future. Through the arch one sees the debris of civilization. I painted Blue Ghost first in only two colors: titanium white and Payne’s gray. (I applied color afterward by method of glazing.)"
"I found advantage in monochrome painting , freeing me from having to consider problems of matching shades of color. This gave me a perfect stage for freely developing image directly on the canvas."
The painting itself would end up darkened beyond recognizability as Samizu’s brushes began to reflect the terrible blankness and blurs accompanying undiagnosed Lyme disease.
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