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30 × 40 cm
Anna Perenna is a studio work by artist Neve, pencils on MDF, 30 × 40 cm, created in 2024.
A studio work in pencil on MDF, 30 × 40 cm, completed in April 2024. The subject is Anna Perenna — the ancient Roman goddess of the year and its cycles, of perpetual return, of the time that renews itself without end. Her name is from *annus perennis*: the perennial year. She is the year made old, and the year that begins again. In Ovid's *Fasti*, Anna Perenna appears as an elderly woman — a crone, shrewd and resourceful — worshipped each year on the Ides of March (March 15) at a popular festival outside the walls of Rome, beside the banks of the Tiber, where people drank wine and made wishes for as many years as cups they could drain. Her antiquity is her nature: she is old because time itself is old, and the oldest things do not die. The work renders her as a hyperrealist close-up portrait: the face of a very old woman filling the frame, her skin deeply lined and mapped with age, warm browns and earth tones built from pencil against a dark ground. She is wrapped or glimpsed through something green — a fold of cloth or cloak, indicated at the edges of the composition in broader, less resolved marks, as if the periphery dissolves while the face holds. Her eyes are turquoise — a vivid, clear teal that stands against the warmth of the skin like water in rock. They look directly outward. In a face that records the full passage of time, the eyes are the thing that has not passed. This is the paradox at the centre of Anna Perenna: the woman who is oldest is the one who keeps returning. The figure who carries the weight of all the years is the one who brings the new year in. The work revisits the same mythological subject Neve had painted at monumental scale in the 2016 Trastevere mural. In the studio format — 30 × 40 cm, pencils — the image becomes intimate and close: the goddess is no longer a wall to walk toward but a face to be looked at from near.