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Up until a few months ago, I was sure I did not want to include any sort of political or social commentary into my work, as I was tired of seeing art with an agenda and longed for art that was simply meant to be admired for its beauty. Much like Matisse, I simply wanted "a good armchair" both in the art I saw and the art I created. My main goal, as selfish as it may seem, is not to make a political statement but rather to simply please myself. I make art that I enjoy creating and enjoy looking at. It is only a secondary goal that my audience like it as well and only an afterthought that there be any sort of meaning behind it. Even so, issues that I did not intend to be present in my artwork have emerged that I have only recently recognized. First, I would like to discuss what I intentionally include in my work and secondly what has come to my attention only after I began making the work. I would like to explain why I draw the nude, specifically the female nude over the male nude, why I draw full-bodied, voluptuous nudes, and why they are of such grand scale and in such sexually provocative poses. Finally and most importantly, I would like to discuss the issues that have emerged within my artwork in the recent months. Because I make the work for myself, I am very particular as to what I draw. I only draw things I enjoy drawing and enjoy looking at. For as long as I can remember, I have, like innumerable artists before me, preferred drawing the female nude over all other subjects. I am very passionate about the sensuality of the form and the way curves connect with the mass of the body to form abstract shapes. There is great beauty in the curves of the female form. Each part of the body merges into the next and forms a wonderful landscape. The skin flows to create a smooth, radiant surface that is both a challenge and a luxury to paint. A great admirer of the female body was Pierre Auguste Renoir. The late nineteenth century French painter used lush, bright colors typical of the Impressionist movement and has been a large influence on my work. A major difference, however, between my work and Renoir's nudes are the attitudes of the models. Renoir admired the women as I do but was interacting with them as a spectator and therefore the viewer of his paintings is a spectator, not actually involved with the model. His women either don't know or don't care that someone is watching them. Perhaps because I am a woman or perhaps because I have different motives than Renoir did, in my nudes there is an intense gaze and interaction between the viewer and the model. The model wants to be gazed upon and is confident enough to invite the viewer's gaze. I am similar to Renoir as far as my color scheme and I also have similar attitudes towards the female nude. Renoir painted the nude simply because he enjoyed it. He would even put his models into certain settings or add props to make his paintings more proper and acceptable to the public just so he could continue painting the nude. I can relate to Renoir's difficulty in finding a reason acceptable to other people for him to paint the nude when in fact he needed no reason at all. In the past, many artists have felt a need to justify their use of the nude female body as subject matter. Unlike these artists, I have no desire to either hide or cushion the fact that I want to draw the female nude. Not only did I find the perfect body-type in the early Playboy magazines but by going to the other extreme and using a agitator of the feminist movement, Playboy magazine, I hope to show that the desire to paint the nude female form is not something that needs to be disguised. The use of the nude female form doesn't have to be controversial or provocative, it can simply be for enjoyment and pleasure and, if the audience so desires, eroticism as well, although that is not my intent. I am making drawings of nude women for the sake of making drawings of nude women. France Borel, author of The Seduction of Venus, wrote, "The act of creation is above all an act of love." I love drawing the female form and do not apologize for it by disguising my figures. I have found pastels to be the one medium that I can manipulate the most when trying to recreate the lushness of the human body. Renoir's contemporary Edgar Degas has become somewhat of a mentor to me in the use of pastels. His work is full of color and movement and although he did not draw the figure as much as Renoir did, I frequently try to emulate his strong use of color and line. Because my preferred medium is pastel, color is very important to the creation of my nudes and I enjoy experimenting with color within the skin tones of my nudes. Degas uses a more painterly line, however, while my work is smooth and blended. My recent work more closely resembles the figures of Renoir although my earlier work shows the influence of the strong, sketchy marks of Degas. In my drawing, "Nude Torso," a study of my sister's torso while she is sitting upright, I have drawn very aggressive markings similar to the energy found in Degas' work. Although mine is a little less refined than one of Degas' nudes, such as "After The Bath," the attention to vibrant color is prevalent in both. In one of my later drawings of a Playboy model, entitled "Window Dressing," the model is much smoother and of a more even tone than in Degas' and my earlier work. Both Renoir and Degas depicted large, curvaceous women in their art. This is the model-type that I portray in my artwork but Renoir and Degas were privileged enough to have constant access to live models which I do not have. So, for lack of models, I turned to other sources where I found that body type. I looked to art historical references and media images from the 1950's and 1960's such as the early Playboy magazines and movie stars such as Jayne Mansfield and Marilyn Monroe, who was not coincidentally the first Playboy playmate. My work tends to be on a fairly large scale, usually life size or larger. In Art and Discontent, author Thomas McEvilley says, "the custom of sculpting pharaohs and their consorts much larger than life is an obvious assertion of political content, a portrayal of the hereditary monarchy beside which ordinary human power seem trivial." This is not to say that I consider the Playboy models to be divine. I do consider women more powerful than the girth or size of their bodies and the scale of my work is very important. By enlarging these Playboy images to life-size, I am suggesting that these women do not belong to the men who view the magazines and although, they are there to be looked at, they are looking back at the viewer as well. I feel my work has more of an impact on the viewer if my pieces are larger but more importantly, I enjoy the process more if my work is on a larger scale. Drawing larger gives me a greater freedom to create the images I desire. The models I have chosen are of a very specific type. They are voluptuous and beautiful by society's standards, as well as mine, although they have fuller figures than what is considered ideal in society today. Because I have chosen the images out of Playboy magazine, specifically editions from the 1960's, the women are in sexually suggestive poses. They have a cute, innocent sexuality but don't scream sexuality like many pictures from today's magazines which are much more explicit. Ideally, I would be working from a live model but in lieu of less-than-perfect conditions, I have resorted to the pictures in magazines that best fit my ideal. This includes full, round bodies and in many cases large bosoms, which I have, interestingly enough, unconsciously de-emphasized in my drawings. France Borel claims that: The artist [chooses] his models according to a 'type' that [haunts] him. And yet he often seems to have been unsatisfied, ever-searching for a more adequate subject, one corresponding more closely to his imagination. Unless, like a Narcissus in disguise, he was looking for a model resembling himself. Interestingly enough, despite my adamant opposition to incorporating political and social commentary in my work, I have come to realize that I inadvertently include lots more than just my enjoyment in drawing the female nude. Contemporary painter Lisa Yuskavage once said, "I am interested in art, not politics." This is certainly true for me as well. I have found a sort of kinship with Yuskavage's work and ideas. She is a contemporary female artist painting the female nude in lush color and is more interested in the act of creation than the meaning behind it. Even so, a major difference between her work and mine goes back to the gaze. In her paintings, most of her models are looking down or away. If they are looking at the viewer, they have a look of embarrassment as if they are ashamed of themselves and their bodies. In my work, especially my most recent drawings, the models are very confident and confrontational. Unlike Renoir's work, Yuskavage's work, and the Playboy photographs, my women are not there simply for the entertainment of the viewer, they are not there simply to be watched. They want to watch back. Besides Lisa Yuskavage, it has been relatively hard for me to find contemporary painters that have the same affection for the nude as I do. Because of this and because many of my models come from pictures, I have turned to photographers for much of my inspiration. Contemporary American photographer Ralph Gibson's work emulates the love for the body that I wish to create in my own work. Although much of his work is overtly sexual, many of his images are simply sensual and about the beauty of the female nude. In many of his pieces, Gibson crops the body in the same way I did in my earlier works such as the aforementioned "Nude Torso," and other drawings done from live models. He does this in an effort to focus on and abstract the parts of the body he found the most interesting and beautiful. My more recent work, however, has less to do with a focus on form and more to do with the body as a whole and the interaction between the model and the viewer through the gaze. Gibson maintains the love for the nude that I try to portray both in my earlier and more recent work. Because of my subject matter, I have unintentionally, possibly subconsciously, turned my nose up at many of the common feminist themes that are so prevalent in society in general and contemporary art made particularly by female artists. Although this is a message that has emerged, it was not intended when the work was started. The use of the nude female form in my art is simply an expression of my interest in the body and my love for color and curves within the body, not part of any sort of political or social agenda. In fact, I find it rather unfortunate that the subject I enjoy drawing, the nude female, is at the center of all those debates. Even so, throughout the process of making my work and while reading books by authors such as Rosemary Betterton and Kenneth Clark, I have come to realize the importance of the underlying messages in my work and their reflection of my own personal feelings on how women are portrayed in art. By rejecting one movement, I have subsequently labeled myself as part of another one. After reading Rosemary Betterton's book, An Intimate Distance: Women, Artists, and the Body, I reevaluated my artwork's social context. Rather than simply being an outcast of the feminist art movement as I supposed, I believe now that my work is part of a new feminist movement of mostly female contemporary artists who reject the original feminist art movement's constraints on sexuality. "They" carry out, as Betterton puts it, "sexually explicit and transgressive art practices" in response to "the nervousness about the body in feminist art" that I have been so adamantly complaining about. I am very forcibly, through my work, asserting that women can be sexual and even sexual objects and that it is all right. Betterton continues, "The shift away from a totalizing view of pornography as sexual exploitation has been paralleled by a move towards the exploration of a range of sexualities." Betterton is referring to those of us responding to the feminist movement. My use of Playboy magazines, which are commonly considered pornography, as source material, and my no-apologies stance on the size or poses of my nudes, leads me to believe that I fit very comfortably into a new, evolved feminism. Apparently, I am not alone in my quest to separate myself from the modern tendency for young women artists to become the feminist stereotype and also in my belief that sexually provocative images of women are all right and potentially empowering. To make it more complicated, however, I don't consider myself, nor do I want to be, purely free from the older ideas of the feminist movement. In my struggle to determine the other possible motives within my work besides pure enjoyment, I have found critic Kenneth Clark to be extremely helpful. His book, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form, has become somewhat of my justification for drawing the nude simply out of a love for drawing the nude. Although he is writing in the 1950's and referring almost exclusively to male artists depicting the nude, I feel many of his thoughts relate to my work as well. In the book, he discusses many reasons why the nude has been such a loved and prevalent subject throughout art history. In the final chapter, "The Nude as an End in Itself," he finally admits that the nude has "achieved an independent existence" and does not have to rely on added meaning in order to thrive despite all of the other reasons he has listed previously in the book. Clark argues that artists have found the female body more rewarding as a subject than the male and more pleasurable to draw due to the ovals, ellipses, and "smoother transitions" within the female body. The female form is more sensual to us and therefore more pleasurable to draw. He speaks of "the enjoyment of continuous surfaces, easy transitions, and delicate modeling" so common in renderings of the female nude from the Greeks to Renaissance artists and beyond. My motives, then, are at least in part, much like Renaissance artists like Raphael's passion for the female nude and despite the Greek tendency towards male nudes, much like Polykleitos' "fervent admiration for physical beauty." The main interest in my work is creating something I enjoy to draw which is subsequently something I find very beautiful, the nude female form. My most recent body of work has been about dealing with images of nude women found in the media such as Playboy magazine and thinking about not only how they make me feel as a woman but also about women being offered as "entertainment for men." I was drawn to the early editions of Playboy initially due to my desire to draw the female nude and my lack of a model. The issues from the late sixties offered me curvy, sensual, naked women that I could study and draw from as long as I wanted. As much as this pleased me, they also came with a disturbing quality so familiar to feminists who have viewed the magazines. The women are not really individuals and human but rather objects available to the reader. I came into conflict over my older feminist and newer feminist opinions. In my art, as in the rest of my life, I feel I am not fully devoted to either the old or the new feminist movement but rather to pieces of both. It is my strongly held belief that women can be sexual objects without compromising their strength or character and while therein becoming even more powerful. Much like a modernist incorporating classical themes in his or her work, I have subjected feminist ideas of equality and strength to newer ideas that sexual images of women can be empowering as much as they are sensual. I hope my larger-than-life portrayals of women show the possibilities of female grandeur. The size that I make my women asserts that the "weaker sex" is anything but if she so desires. Their monumentality is a reflection of how I feel women should assert themselves as strong and powerful. I believe women should feel important and comfortable enough with their bodies and minds to present themselves as secure and authoritative. It is interesting, it may be argued, that I have chosen Playboy centerfolds as my subjects. I believe this choice is not only due to my search for the perfect model but also the new-feminist part of me that believes that sexually suggestive images such as the ones I have chosen are a perfectly fine part of contemporary society. Traditionally, feminist activists have scorned the Playboy enterprise ever since Gloria Steinem posed as a bunny in 1963. The models are putting themselves out there for the "entertainment" of the readers. However, I really find nothing morally wrong with magazines such as Playboy as long as the idea that all women are only "entertainment for men" does not permeate society. Through my artwork, I hope to show these old and new feminist attitudes. More importantly, however, is my selfishness in wanting to please myself by creating what I enjoy. My use of Playboy magazine shows my love in depicting beautiful, voluptuous women but also is an outlet for my concern about the way women are portrayed in society. The way they gaze at the viewer and the size of the drawings assert their potential as more than just "entertainment for men." Despite these issues, more than anything, I strive to create an art that I will enjoy and that hopefully my audience will as well
Works Consulted 1. Betterton, Rosemary. An Intimate Distance:
Women, Artists, and the Body. New York: Routledge, 1996. |