This scarf, stencilled with hand painting, is an excerpt from a much larger scene depicting the womens’ bath and wet sauna facility at King Spa in Palisades Park NJ. 

The large scene from which this vignette derives is a 9 x 15 foot silk painting containing over 30 figures. The large work exists as an edition of 2 stencil monotypes that share the same stencil matrix used to establish the composition, but vary somewhat due to the hand coloring.

The overall scene incorporates figures from the canon of bathing history, lifting poses from works by Cranach, Kiyonaga, Courbet, Cezanne, Picasso, Bonnard, Bob Thompson, and others. The purely invented figures in the scene pertain to my experience of the seshin treatment, performed on myself and Jeannine Han by two scrub mistresses.