• Sewing childhood pillow she made me

• Use close intimacy like lacemaker to show her dedication and hard work for her family 

  • Hand Sewing (Painstaking work)

• "proves worth" by physically carrying the weight of family

• Carabao is moved in the direction that the family wants it to go

• "It is quite prevalent, up until now, within Filipino context that asking for help might bring shame to the family once the community finds out about a family member being ‘broken’.  Family pride supersedes any member’s mental disorder."

I suggest it to you partly because of how Daumierixes drawing and painting in its making, but also because he has such obvious compassion for the woman in the foreground and more complicated (possibly contemptuous) feeling for the welthier passengers in the front of the omnibus. He seems to strike this difficult, almost allegorical tone that you might be after...will keep thinking about this...

It's interesting to note how many people write about intimacy, and the role of scale in creating it. Another theme is utility, which i feel you're also involed with...

We discussed the way Beckmann nods to theatre in this painting, keeping the space shallow and not letting us feel much air in the painting. We discussed how he focuses on hands. feet and faces as powerful tools for eliciting responses from viewers (in The Departure, which I posted a moment ago, animals are present...mostly fish...).

It's worth looking at Beckmann's drawings, too. Here is a link to a study he made after the painting...it is apparently part of a series, called Hell. The notes reveal how much Beckmann was thinking about the theater in his composition:

“For the world is Hell”, the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer – whose works Beckmann devoured – had concluded in 1851, “and men are on the one hand the tormented souls and on the other the devils in it.” [...] The Hell Beckmann portrays is like Schopenhauer’s in that there is no escaping it. His cycle depicts human drama as “scene[s] in the theatre of the eternal”