Saintly Sinner

This painting is based on an antique photo of a Wichita saloon girl, dated 1886. Many of the  saloon girls were women who were forced to earn a living in an era that offered few means for women to do so. If for some reason a woman was not married, or marriageable, she had few choices in how to support herself.
The photo I worked from intrigued me: the young woman is a mixture of innocence and sensuality. I had worked on this piece for a while before the provocativeness of her pose actually hit me.