Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…

It is National Relaxation Day—yawwnnnnnnn.

Artist Will Barnet explains more about this restful scene titled Sleeping Child:

"I wanted to present a modern-day Mother and Child.… So I created a woman on a bed involved in her morning toilette with my daughter lying on her lap. It's all very abstract, of course. You cannot see the bed, you just feel it's there, and my daughter is not connected in the sense of an old-fashioned picture with the child nestled to its mother. Here are two distinct personalities. There is a certain attachment between the child and the mother by way of the mother's protective presence. We sense the stillness of the child contrasted with the tension created by the mother's activity. I paid homage to the beauty and dignity of the human figure. A passing moment becomes an eternity."

Source: National Museum of American Art (CD-ROM) (New York and Washington D.C.: MacMillan Digital in cooperation with the National Museum of American Art, 1996).

Pictured: Will Barnet, born 1911, Sleeping Child, 1961, oil, 62 x 48 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Sara Roby Foundation.