Faculty of Art

Drawing and Painting

Ruby Döern

The Brave Four

A work in Hör zu, ich erzähle dir was / “Listen, I’ll tell you something.” a series of oil paintings depicting a variety of animals specific to stories from the artists’ ancestry across Central Europe.

“My final painting, The Brave Four, is a family portrait and a reference to one of the very first stories I came across in my research. The painting depicts my O Oma, my Oma, my mom, and baby me posing for a photo with four animals walking along the outer rim. These animals are the Bremen Town Musicians from the Brothers Grimm stories. Included in Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s second volume of “Children’s and Household Tales” in 1819, the Four Musicians is a story of senior animals who banded together to travel to Bremen. They had each been too old to continue their work so the donkey, the first character in the story, found the dog, then the cat, and finally the rooster to band together and start a new life in Bremen. I felt this story connected deeply with my O Omas’ travels as she made her way from her home in Austria to Bremen in order to start her new life in Canada. This is why the donkey starts on her and shows the animals travelling forward with me as the rooster at the end. This composition is powerful as we are four generations of women, all firstborn daughters, and have travelled far to get where we are now. ”