Well, since this section is pretty much dead, I thought I'd perform a little boredom fueled necromancy. I find this has the potential to be a very useful area of the board. So, without anything further, I present this:
(Note: This thread will make heavy use of the Metroid Manga, which is considered canon to the Metroid series. As a Manga, it is read from right to left instead of the traditional left to right of western comics.)
Origin: Samus was born on the mining colony K-2L around the year 2000 of the Galactic Calendar. She was the only survivor of a Space Pirate raid of the colony.
Humans cannot survive in the harsh climates of the planet Zebes, so Samus is given some genetic enhancements.
At age 3-6, Samus jumps off of a cliff and not only survives unharmed, but makes a crater in the ground when she does so.
At age 14, Samus is fast enough to jump in front of a blast, grab the person being fired at, and then jump away before the blast hits.
In the time between the blast being fired and hitting its target, Samus has equipped the suit, grabbed Gray Voice, and jumped away.
Samus destroys a work robot, an enemy that is known to be invulnerable to most weapons, with a single punch.
The shots bouncing off may indicate that the Speed Booster was in use, but it does not do this in the games.
The Power Suit: This is the normal suit that Samus wears. It is modular in nature, allowing it to equip numerous power-ups from almost any technological source. It has an energy shield surrounding it that acts as Samus' health. It the energy tanks are depleted, the suit is destroyed. The suit is also equipped with an arm cannon that can make use of almost any weapon.
Samus in the Power Suit taking a stomp from Kraid with no apparent damage. Kraid weighs over 110 tons.
The Varia Suit: Both an upgrade to the Power Suit and another suit altogether. The Varia suit is much more powerful than the Power Suit and specializes in protection from extreme temperatures. It also grants immunity to acid. The most common form grants 50% damage reduction.
The Gravity Suit: The Gravity Suit is another upgrade to the power suit. It allows free movement in water or magma. The protection against extreme temperatures is icreased to the point of taking no damage from magma. It adds 25% damage reduction, up to 75%.
Weapons: The arm cannon contains several weapons, the standard beams consume no ammo while missiles do.
The Power Beam: The stardard beam. This is the weakest beam, but is much more powerful in the Manga.
The Plasma Beam: A peircing beam, it goes through what the wave beam doesn't. Namely, anything classified as an "enemy." That can include robots, creatures, whatever. If it moves, the plasma beam kils it.
It might take a while, but since OneManga has been shut down I think I'll go and update the image links that Scenario posted. Anyone else feel free to help out okay?
Scenario wrote: Well, since this section is pretty much dead, I thought I'd perform a little boredom fueled necromancy. I find this has the potential to be a very useful area of the board. So, without anything further, I present this:
I was testing out Samus' shinespark and comparing it to her missiles and super missiles. Here's what I noticed.
It's obvious projectiles will have a head start, so for this to be tested properly, the shinespark must start immediately after the projectile is fired.
When Samus takes flight, she tends to remain close to the missile. So close, in fact, that she's actually touching it.
That's exactly how it happens. Samus doesn't even touch the super missile. It's long gone, it already hit the other side before Samus touches the other side. So I was curious just how fast Samus traveled between using the Speed Booster and shinespark. I first had to determine where the Speed Booster activates, and then use that very spot to also use the shinespark. I won't say it was perfect, but I tried getting the timing correctly. The Speed Booster allowed Samus to cover a certain area in 00:00:01:56. The shinespark was 00:00:01:32.
Supersonic speed is Mach 1.2, which is 921.6 mph or 411.6 m/s. So, adding 15% to the speed should be 1,059.84 mph, which is between Mach 1.3 and 1.4. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to see how fast the missiles and super missiles go, but I'm going to guess that within half a millisecond it exceeds Mach 1.4. The super missile is just ridiculous, though. So yeah. Hopefully I did all of this correctly.
On a side note, there is also the speed increase with Samus' Varia Suit in Metroid II: Return of Samus. This is strictly only that game. There is a hallway along the way to acquiring the Varia Suit. If memory serves, it took 11 seconds to get to the other side. With the Varia Suit it only took 10. This is a 9% difference, meaning that if Samus' running speed is 65 mph, since she outruns a particular avalanche, then this would increase Samus' speed to 71 mph.
When Samus begins walking away from Gandrayda after the two go up the elevator, it shows Samus walking a distance. Well, when Gandrayda fires at Samus, strangely she isn't even far from Gandrayda. Based on what I've observed, Samus is in her Morph Ball mode, and from Conglometroid, the size of the Morph Ball is 75.85 centimeters. So what I did was I took that number and had to somewhat place two Morph Ball sizes close to each other. I took the full size of the Morph Ball, which was 52 pixels, and the other portion, which was 22.
75.85 + (.58)(75.85) = 119.843 cm. Well, 119.843 cm is the same as 1.19843 m. Surprisingly, this falls very close to point-blank range, which is 3 feet. 1.19843 is the same as 3.9 feet. Well, after doing all of that, I decided to go with subsonic speeds here, meaning the projectile fired at Samus would be traveling 614.4 mph, which is the same as 274.73.
Since milliseconds represent 1/1,000, this means that 0.004 seconds is the same as 4 milliseconds. Just for fun, if the projectile was traveling at the speed of sound, Samus' RT here would be 3 milliseconds, and if at supersonic (Mach 1.2), 2 milliseconds.
I've been curious about how much gravity Nightmare increased in Metroid: Other M and Metroid Fusion. Of course, the two are different because in MOM if Samus fires a missile, it will travel a certain distance, whereas in MF once it's fired, it drops automatically to the ground. So I may have found out how much gravity Nightmare increased in MOM. I had gone with 2 g simply because it was the lowest and safest assumption one could make. If that was the case, then it would mean that Samus' weight would have been 180 kg.
Well, just today I asked elsewhere about this, and a fellow used the kinematic equation to determine how much increase in gravity there was in MOM. Of course, I would like to make sure if this is accurate. I had failed to mention how the projectile was being fired and in what direction it was being fired. Fortunately this person assumed correctly that it was being fired like a bullet. I don't know if mentioning the distance between the projectile and the ground would have made any difference in the gravitational increase, but here's what I was given.
If a projectile covers 10 meters while traveling 343 m/s in the forward direction, that means it was in the air for approximately 10/343 seconds, or .02915 seconds. For Earth's gravity, the bullet has to fall from it's starting height to zero in that time frame. Using the kinematic equation, x = 1/2 gt^2 +x_0, we get that x_0 has to be 4.16789 mm above the ground.
Using this same starting point, we can solve for gravity by filling in what we know to the kinematic equation from before, x(t) = 1/2 g t^2 +x_0. We find the time this projectile is in the air as we did before, 4.551 m / 343 m/s to get 0.013268 seconds. Assuming same starting point and flat angle of firing.
So, there you guys have it. This would mean that Samus' weight was 432 kg. Although this is a small number, make no mistake that under this gravity no human would be standing. (Samus could walk along Jupiter without the Gravity Suit if its surface was solid. Jupiter's gravity is 2.54 greater than Earth's.) They should be lying down on the ground at 2 g. So this is still impressive. If Nightmare's gravity is much greater in MF, then we just might have g greater than 4.8. Now people might be wondering where I got the 10 meters and the 4.551 meters. I simply took this from the Metroid.com where it said the missiles traveled between 3 - 10 m. If the missiles travel further than this, it just may mean a higher gravity.
The 4.551 meters came from the distance the missile covered in MOM. This wasn't an easy task, as I had to shift from first-person to third-person. I got around 6 Morph Balls in distance. According to the Conglometroid site concerning the size of the Morph Ball, the approximated value was 75.85 cm. in diameter. We know already in Metroid Prime that there is a small tunnel that is 1 meter in diameter, so the Morph Ball would have to be slightly smaller than that. Well, 75.85 * 6 = 455.1 cm, or 4.551 m.
So yeah, if anyone wants to give any input on this or feels like this could be tested again to make sure it's accurate, go right ahead. My only problem is x_0 having to be 4.16789 mm from the ground. We know Samus stands 6'3", so with her arm straight out might make this gravity greater or lesser. I'm not sure, but I'm inclined to think it would be greater.
Looking at the Observatory in Metroid Prime, I noticed an asteroid belt, which leads me to believe that Ceres Station is not located in the same asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, thus, I am left in the dark concerning the Metroid cosmos. Ignore my hypothesis.
I might expand on this further if I am feeling motivated or bored. So here's what I have so far and I really am not sure if anyone has ever tried this out for the Metroid series.
I have made note that the Metroid Universe seems to be based on our universe. This would mean that the planets and solar systems are located within the Milky Way. The only other galaxy aside from this one is the Tetra Galaxy. Of course, we don't know where that is located. In fact, we don't know where any planet is located.
I have an idea, however. This idea may give us a starting point if it is true, and that starting point would be Ceres Station. In Super Metroid, this station appears to be surrounded by asteroids, so perhaps this station was named after the dwarf planet Ceres. Perhaps it is also located within the same asteroid belt.
If Ceres Station is located within the same asteroid belt, it would mean that it is orbiting around the Sun, which would also place it between Mars and Jupiter. If this is also true, this should also mean planet Zebes is located within our solar system. Of course, this causes a problem because Zebes is in a solar system of its own.
Prior to Metroid Prime, it may have been the idea that Zebes was located within our solar system, which means there wasn't another solar system. This brings up a few problems. First, if Zebes is in another solar system, then Ceres Station is not in our solar system, meaning that we are once again left in the dark.
Second, if Ceres Station is located in the asteroid belt, and if Zebes is in another solar system, then by using the distance between Ceres and Eris, I can find out how far Samus at least traveled. For the aphelion distance it is 14,161,562,751,518.94 meters (1.49691034 × 10⁻³ ly), and for the perihelion distance, it is 5,359,822,431,013.74 meters (5.66545779 × 10⁻⁴ ly).
Samus Aran is 90 kilograms. The Speed Booster allows Samus to run at supersonic speeds. The low-end is Mach 1.2. At sea level, the speed of sound travels at 343 m/s. 343 m/s * 1.2 = 411.6 m/s. Using different formulae, we can learn how many joules Samus would produce, the TNT equivalent, the newtons, and the g-force.
1 gram of TNT is equal to 4,184 J. 1 ton of TNT is equal to 4,184,000,000 J. Because the amount of joules produced from Samus when she dashes at supersonic speeds is smaller, she won't be producing the equivalent of even 1 ton of TNT. If 1 gram of TNT is equal to 4,184 joules, then multiplying that by 1,000 will give us 1 kilogram of TNT, which is equal to 4,184,000 joules. 7,623,655.2 joules is greater than 4,184,000 joules. Dividing them will give the amount of TNT.
In both Metroid Fusion and Metroid: Zero Mission, it takes about 2 seconds for Samus to travel supersonic speeds. I will determine the g-force by means of acceleration.
According to Wikipedia, "A hard slap on the face may briefly impose hundreds of g locally but not produce any real damage; a constant 16 g for a minute, however, may be deadly." (Wikipedia - g-force)
Using the equation, d = vit 1/2 at^2, I was able to figure the distance Samus dropped. I originally assumed 30.49 m. (100 ft.), but after using the equation, I ended up with a distance of 59.34 m. (194.64 ft.) I timed the drop three times. The results were:
Then I divided 10.43 / 3, which gave me 00:00'03"47. Because the initial velocity and time was zero, we can ignore that.
In order to find out the impact force, I will divide newton-meters by 0.5 m. because Samus ends up crouching once she lands.
I decided to calculate the drop of this elevator, although I only used the stop watch once. The time I got was 1.93 seconds. I'll use a similar calculation to what I have done before to find the distance.
I will use the standard weight of an elevator according to the American National Elevator Standards Group, which is 997.9 kg.
Because the entire elevator is destroyed on impact, I will divide that by 1, which will simply give me 178,474.415 N. As for the velocity it was traveling, that would be sqrt((2)(9.8 m/s)(18.25 m.)), which is 18.91 m/s, or 42.27 mi/h.
9.13 / 3 = 3.04 seconds. Using gt^2/2, I end up with 45.28 meters, or 148.52 feet. That doesn't seem very high, but that's 13.72 stories, so I suppose this image gives a nice visual of how far the drop was.
In this post, the gravity produced by Nightmare is 4.8 g. I don't disagree with the equation used to get 4.8 g, but Samus' missiles travel at the same speed as Samus' shinespark, but the missile gains extra speed after about 1 second. So instead of using 343 m/s for Samus' missile, I will use 411.6 m/s, since that's Mach 1.2.
In Metroid: Zero Mission, Samus' arm cannon is pointing outward horizontally. She's 1.98 m. I checked the pixels for Samus in MZM, so 1.98 m. is equal to 81 pixels. The bottom of the tip of Samus' arm cannon to the ground is 53 pixels.
With this in mind, I will use the equation, g = 2(viyt - Δy) / t², where g is gravity, viy is the initial velocity for the y axis, t is time, Δy is change in initial height divided by time squared. Because the initial velocity and time is 0, that will be ignored. I will begin with the distance Samus' missiles traveled under the gravity produced by Nightmare, which was 4.551 m.
Samus' missiles, according to the official Metroid Prime Web site, can travel 3 to 10 m. I will use the same equation, the only difference now being the time it would take for Samus' missiles to travel 10 m. while traveling 411.6 m/s.
21,201.7670444692484371206676 m/s / 4,391.2253951999874861275618 m/s = 4.83 g. Under 343 m/s, it's 4.82 g, so the difference is rather negligible. In Metroid Fusion, Samus' missiles drop as soon as they're fired. I think it would be generous for me to say that Samus' missiles even travel 1 m. when she's fighting Nightmare in MF. Using the same calculation, I end up with the following.
One of the other issues I have with this, however, is that visual evidence does not show that the effective range for Samus' missiles is 10 m. I have checked that RPGs can fire 100 to 800 m. If I use 100 m. instead, I'll end up with different results.
Since I have the meters per second for when Samus' missile only covers a range of 4.551 meters, I will take the end result for both and divide them.
If I do the same thing with Nightmare in MF, I end up getting 9,999.99 g. That's ridiculously high. I'm sure it could be hand waved by saying Samus was integrated with Chozo DNA, so for all we know, that's allowing her to survive extreme gravity. If that's the case, her bones, muscles, and tissue are more durable.
So why need the Gravity Suit? Well, considering Samus can move and wall-jump in extreme gravity, perhaps the only reason for the Gravity Suit is to make traversing under this condition easier. After all, she can traverse in water without the Gravity Suit, but again, it makes her getting through it easier.
Both calculations are correct as far as I'm aware, but the main issue is if Nightmare in MOM increased gravity by 482.82 times Earth's, and if Samus is struggling under that condition to move around, then why doesn't 9,999.99 g kill her? The only way to resolve this is by finding a flaw in the calculation for one or both, or ignoring one of the two calculations with reason.
In the early 1940s, it appeared as though Maria Izquierdo’s life was about to take a turn for the better. She was at the height of her artistic career, focusing primarily on portraits and still-lifes, reminiscent of her early subject matter. In many ways, she was now producing a deeper, more mature quality of work than ever before. Many of her paintings reflected the surrealist influence of Antonin Artaud, but Izquierdo retained elements of her earlier style, refusing to confine herself to the label of “Surrealism.” She had also begun drawing inspiration from more personal sources, making the paintings from this period some of her most impressive and profound.
It appeared as though her personal life was coming together as well. In 1944, Izquierdo married her second husband, Raul Uribe, a Chilean painter. After a lifetime of struggling under the pressure of being a female artist and a single mother, constantly at odds with society’s expectations, it seemed that Izquierdo was finally finding a measure of happiness.
Unfortunately, this positive outlook did not last long. In 1945, Izquierdo was vying for an important mural commission from the Palacio Nacional of Mexico City. She had submitted sketches and was on the brink of receiving the job, when Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siquieros stepped forward to publicly disapprove of the offer, claiming that Izquierdo was not qualified to paint the mural. As two of the “big three” muralists working in Mexico during the time, Siquieros and Rivera’s opinions were well-respected and Izquierdo was denied the commission.
After the incident, Izquierdo looked for support from the community but found herself largely on her own. Rita Pomade writes, “When she dared to denounce [Rivera and Siquieros] in public, she received little help and a lot of strong criticism. She lost a lot of money, and her heart was broken.”
The consequences of this event were not confined to her professional life: “Izquierdo began to experience nightmares that left her sleepless. One day, she arose and drew what she remembered… a clear vision of herself, in a window of metaphysical dimension, holding her own decapitated head as her body, still walking, becomes lost in the distance of steps leading to a void” (Pomade). This image turned into her work Sueño y Presentimiento (Dream and Premonition), painted in 1947, which eventually came to be known as the last of her great works.
In a way, Izquierdo’s premonition came true. In 1948, just a year after completing the work, Izquierdo suffered an embolism that left her partially paralyzed, effectively “cutting” her off from her body, as predicted in her dream. Facing any artist’s worst fear, Izquierdo struggled to train herself to paint with her non-dominant hand instead. She produced all of her final works this way, until the time of her death, but the paintings she did left-handed never reached the same caliber as her previous works.
Izquierdo’s home life was suffering, as well. Her second marriage was failing, and she and Uribe finally divorced in 1953. Izquierdo died two years later, in Mexico City, at the age of 53.
María Izquierdo lived a short life, filled with personal and professional difficulties. She faced two failed marriages, raised three children on her own, and never received due recognition for her artistic accomplishments. Her life was a constant battle as she fought against society’s expectations of what she should—and could—offer the world. Through it all, however, Izquierdo pushed back against the stereotypes of the time, standing proud as a single mother and a female artist during a time when those labels were not socially acceptable. She also turned her suffering into meaningful art with Sueño y Presentimiento which, according to some, was her greatest work of all. “On October 25, 2002…. [she] was declared a Monumento Artistico de la Nación by Mexico City’s National Commission for Arts and Culture…. [guaranteeing] that her work will be protected, catalogued, studied, and conserved to ensure that her legacy will be there for future generations” (Pomade). It has come a little late, but María Izquierdo is finally receiving the recognition she deserves.
Throughout her painting career, María Izquierdo experimented with many different styles and subject matter. However, there were common elements in most of her works, including a sense of intimacy that draws viewers into her paintings. She avoided strictly political themes because she felt that they lacked emotional depth; she focused instead on the personal. In her article “María Izquierdo: Monumento Artistico de la nación,” Rita Pomade writes that “[Izquierdo’s] work became imbued with the nuance of intimacy—a feeling of quiet personal communion between herself and the viewer. She claimed that art was a language that brought to light the hidden, and she strived for this in her paintings.”
This intimacy keeps viewers interested as they delve deeper in the work, realizing that there is more to her paintings than first meets the eye. “Her work… pulls you into the paintings and leaves you with a dreamy nostalgia and a subtle feeling of unrest. Her people and still lifes appear bold and up front. But behind the obvious is something undefined—haunting, ephemeral. The strong colors have disquieting shadows. The figures of the children are odd, the shoulders exaggerated—just a bit” (Pomade).
Another common thread in Izquierdo’s style is the feeling of primitivism to which she frequently returned throughout her career. Pomade writes: “Vigorous strokes, strong color and texture, and a world of primitivism and dreams—so typically Mexican, yet so universal in expression—are Izquierdo’s strengths.” She adds that:
“In body and temperament she seemed like an extension of her work. The Mexican poet, Octavio Paz, captured this connection between woman and work when he wrote: ‘María looked like a prehistoric goddess. Her face like mud dried by the sun… and smoky like copal incense… but that woman with the terrible air of a prehistoric goddess was at the same time sweetness, shy, intimate.’”
Indeed, María often straddled a difficult line between all of her various identities; she produced surrealist and nationalist works from a female perspective—a perspective that was not widely accepted during her time.
Izquierdo began her career painting portraits and still lifes. In these works she often utilized rich, ocher-earth colors and a realistic feel. Even early-on, these still lifes were out of the ordinary. According to Edward Gomez, “[w]ith their broad, brushy passages of thick color and sometimes-unusual perpectives, Izquierdo’s still lifes and seemingly ordinary scenes can seem charged with restless energy.”
Izquierdo eventually switched her focus from portraits and still lifes to popular culture and tradition. Through her art, she attempted to address and help define national identity. However, she did so outside of the typical framework of male dominance, through which many of her nationalist counterparts structured their work. Birbragher writes that “Izquierdo managed to remain a pioneer, at both the artistic and political levels, and a leading figure of the women’s emancipation movement.” For instance, in her sketch for a mural project in 1945, Izquierdo depicted an Aztec leader paired with a modern Mexican woman, an indication of the vital role she believed women should play in society, a role into which they were not fully being allowed to live.
Izquierdo differed from the muralists in another important way in her depictions of the historical and cultural values of her country. As in many of her earlier works, Izquierdo focused on the intimate over the political, “reject[ing] social realism and propaganda art, [and] developing instead a personal, intimate and poetic style which allowed her to express a universal message while at the same time maintaining her ‘Mexican-ness’” (Birbragher). In other words, Izquierdo sought to offer a representation of Mexican identity that went beyond politics, to the deeper root of human emotion and cultural identity.
During the early 1930s, Izquierdo painted a number of circus-themed works which, according to Meg Nola, “particularly capture her skill at contrasting dualities of bright color before a backdrop of displacement or sadness.” In Mexican culture, the circus is a tradition rich with history. The practice can be traced back to the Aztecs, when performers would entertain the king’s court.
The “carpa” was a type of Mexican theatre, similar to, but different from the more European type of circus. González and Sloan explain that “[o]ne could go to a carpa in the late 1800s and expect to see feats of acrobatics, talented singers, plenty of bawdy humor, and a fair amount of political satire” (2). Izquierdo had a special tie with the carpa from her childhood; circus performers frequently visited the town where she was raised, and when she was two years old, she was actually kidnapped by a circus troupe for 24 hours. Here she experienced firsthand a world of unconventional bohemian magic that was quite different from her strict religious upbringing.
The carpa clearly had a profound impact on Izquierdo as a child, as she later depicted it in several of her paintings. Among these were Circus Bareback Rider (1932), The Circus Woman (1932), and Circus Horsewoman (1932). Francine Birbragher writes that these circus works were an important time of new exploration for Izquierdo, as she experimented with color and style: “These pieces recreate female figures frozen in time, artists without a public, melancholic and solitary atmospheres… In this series, Izquierdo changes her palette to include pinks, blues, and yellows inspired by the Mexican popular arts. From this time on, this color becomes a constant feature of her pictorial style. The circus works also introduce the horse, a recurrent reference in her later work.”
The 1930s were also a time when Izquierdo produced a number of allegories. In some of these allegories, Izquierdo depicted feminist themes such as oppression and sacrifice, to which many women of her time could relate. The paintings clearly speak to the experiences of a woman living in a world dominated by man. For example, Birbragher points out that “[i]n Allegory of Work (1936), male legs appear as a symbol of this domination in which women live and suffer under” while the column to the right of the painting suggests male authority and control, as well.
“The sacrificial mood of the painting… is reinforced by the depiction of enslaved women, shown nude or partially clothed with their torsos exposed and their hands or entire bodies tied up with rigid ropes. Classical columns stand incongruously in desolate spaces. Traditionally, columns are interpreted as symbols of culture, and because of their phallic shafts, of manmade culture. Given that over time columns have also served as sacrificial stones, Izquierdo seems to have combined these various traditions to symbolically show women as the sacrificial victims of the dominant patriarchal culture.” (Mirkin 30)
Through these works, Izquierdo contributed to a larger conversation regarding women’s place in Mexican culture, historically, as well as the position they should have been allowed to hold in the society of Izquierdo’s time.
One of these feminist issues that certainly resonated with Izquierdo in particular was the idea of an arranged marriage. Her grandmother convinced her to agree to an arranged marriage to a military officer when she was only 14 years old and, as such, she likely felt as though her childhood had been taken away too soon. In her essay, “To Paint the Unspeakable,” Dina Comisarenco Mirkin discusses the theme of an unhappy bride seen in one of Izquierdo’s paintings.
“The Bride’s Veil (1943) by María Izquierdo may reflect the artist’s personal experience of an unwelcome arranged marriage… In particular, the small size of the furniture, the low perspective, and the disordered elements of the composition call to mind the world of childhood that had been stolen from Izquierdo and many other young girls forced into arranged marriages in such a brutal way.” (23)
Izquierdo made it clear through her paintings that she believed women could be active members of society, helping to perpetuate culture and define the national identity of Mexico. Her altar scenes in particular bring her intimate style together with themes of feminism and nationalism, drawing connections that were profound for her time. Through these cupboard altars, Mexican women were able to add a rich religious context to their everyday domestic roles, and thus “propagate their national culture, generational traditions, and religious beliefs” (Donovan 162).
The late 1940s and early 1950s saw the creation of some of Izquierdo’s most difficult and profound work. In Sueño y Presentimiento (1947), she depicted a premonitory dream in which she held her own decapitated head, and in Towards Paradise (1954), Izquierdo painted “an almost abstract picture in which the world is divided into the hot earth, where a fire burns, and a cloudy sky, where we can see a small window, perhaps suggesting the possibility of a world different from that in which she lived and painted, a paradise far from the early world which she was to leave the next year” (Birbragher).
Indeed, Izquierdo died in 1955, but not without impacting the art world in a critical way. She was a master of intimate still lifes and haunting circus themes. She incorporated feminist themes into her works; not in a vague, political sense, but in way that was personal, real, and relatable for so many women who were struggling with the same issues. In all, it’s impossible to deny that María Izquierdo was a pioneer for Mexican women artists, leaving behind works that are still studied and respected today.
Support for this project was provided by the Great Lakes Colleges Association as part of its New Directions Initiative, made possible by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
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