Daphne HRC - Lady Sakura

Lady Sakura

Artist: Daphne HRC
Title: Lady Sakura
Year: 2026
Technique: Mixed media. Graphic drawing transferred onto canvas, interventions and touches with acrylic paint
Support: 100% cotton canvas of 320 g/m² mounted on a wooden frame, ready to hang. Frame not included.
Dimensions: 30 x 40

Edition: This is a unique piece - in a single edition - ensuring exclusivity for the purchaser

Conditions: Excellent

Certificate: Included, authentic hand-signed by the artist.

Signature: Work hand-signed on the back

Shipping: by courier. The artwork will be adequately packed with bubble wrap and other packing material and cardboard.

Description of the work
Lady Sakura arises from the direct confrontation with the tradition of Renaissance portraiture and, in particular, with Leonardo da Vinci’s iconography of the Lady with the Ermine. The work reuses its compositional structure and the idea of the female figure portrayed with an animal in her arms, radically transforming meanings, languages, and cultural references.

At the center of the composition stands a lady of Renaissance elegance, characterized by Japanese-inspired features. The fusion between European court imagination and Oriental physiognomy produces a figure deliberately out of time and outside conventional geographic coordinates. The face thus becomes a space where cultures meet, while the clothing and the pose maintain the solemn and iconic character of the historic portrait.

The element that most markedly introduces a rupture with the Leonardian model is the animal. The ermine is replaced by a basset hound, whose presence radically changes the tone of the image. The symbolism of the aristocratic animal is replaced by that more intimate and contemporary of the domestic animal and the affectionate relationship between human and animal companion. The result is a visual short circuit that pairs the solemn, ieratic dignity of the Renaissance portrait with the ironic, everyday dimension of the present.

Technique and language
The realization begins with a graphic drawing – blending various digital resources and exploring different artistic techniques (Photoshop, Procreate, AI resources) – transferred onto canvas, subsequently subjected to manual interventions with acrylic paint. The coexistence of graphic line and painterly material makes the construction process legible and links two different expressive modes: the projective precision of drawing and the gestural freedom of painting.

The process helps place the work in a contemporary dimension, in which the image is not simply reproduced but filtered, altered, and reinterpreted through the layering of languages.

Interpretation
The work frames a meditation on reusing images from art history and on the possibility of transforming a past icon through elements belonging to contemporary sensibility.

The reference to the Lady with the Ermine is thus not a simple quotation but becomes the starting point for a game of contaminations: Renaissance and Japanese culture, historic portrait and contemporary graphics, solemnity and irony, symbolic animal and domestic animal.

The lady thus becomes an archetypal figure, suspended between eras and cultures, while the basset hound introduces an unexpected element capable of diminishing the image’s solemnity and, at the same time, making it more human and closer to the sensibility of today’s spectator.

Artist

Daphne HRC’s artistic path stems from training at an art high school and continues with studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Perugia, where she has developed an evolving personal research that has allowed her to enter the local art circuit with public and critical acclaim. Her research arises from the encounter between digital design, surface, and material: each composition is conceived and drawn personally and later transformed into a physical work through manual and material interventions. The image is not the endpoint, but the beginning of a process in which matter, light, and surface contribute to making each work unique.

Each work is signed and documented by the artist and accompanied by a certificate of authenticity.
Instagram: Daphnehrc_art