"The artist has created an illusion, a separate 'reality', a personal vision that through transformation into an art object may be shared with others. It is this compelling nature of this communication that gives art its power."
-Harriet Wadeson, Art Psychotherapy, p. 4

Making art is like dreaming. It is a way to sort out the problems of my mind. In this way, art is about expressing personal issues. Art functions simultaneously as a therapeutic process and as a method for expressing my attitudes and beliefs. Besides functioning as a therapeutic tool, I also use art to discuss the issues I face as a woman in this society. I create paintings and drawings that express my inner conflicts, misery, and desires. These conflicts have to do with my personal experiences concerning struggling with my identity, and exploring the differences between looking at myself, women, and men. There are many confusing messages that society sends to women, and in my art I raise these issues for both myself and the viewer to ponder. Another important aspect of my work is the question of who is the artist and who is the object of the art. I create self-portraits that complicate the idea of the artistic genius capturing the object of beauty. By the "object of beauty", I am referring to the way that artists have been involved with depicting the "ideal" female and how there really is no fixed perception of what is ideal. The standards of beauty are forever evolving, in accordance with the fashion of the time, and I am concerned with society's message that there is a "perfect" kind of woman that we must live up to.

We don't definitively know the purpose of dreams, but they have remained an intriguing tool of investigation of the human mind throughout history. They have been considered in various ways, from omens to the keys to the unconscious (Wadeson, 210). I focus here on the way that dreams are a language just as art can be. Many psychologists, including Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, consider dreams to be helpful in the therapeutic process. Freud explains further by saying "Part of the difficulty of giving an account of dreams is due to our having to translate the image into words. 'I could draw it," a dreamer often says to us, 'but I don't know how to say it'" (Wadeson, 210).

During the art making process, I describe visually what I have difficulty explaining verbally. The art object and the dream are related in this way, both existing as products of self-expression. Even though it is subjective, in presenting a work of art, the artist allows her world to be interpreted by the audience as they wish. Certain aspects of a work may contain a universal quality wherein different people may have the same reaction. These symbols speak to us in many ways; we see them all around us in our daily lives, such as in advertising. Many Americans don't realize how pervasive advertising is to our lives. "Deep-rooted symbols are used subliminally and cynically in advertisements, and even in the images and rhetoric of political campaigns" (Fontana, 8). Advertising agents are a very powerful force in our society, swaying us to eat drink or otherwise consume a product without us even realizing how we arrived at that decision.

Each of us may also have our own symbols that hold more significance personally. There are various images that I may incorporate in my work that evoke certain elements of my life and myself that are meaningful only to me. I am fascinated with this idea of a work of art being a secret message that can tell a story about the person who made it. My intention as an artist has a great deal to do with this notion of the image as a means of communication. Thus, art as therapy is an integral part of my art. My very personal works are more symbolic, showing aspects of my life that hold great meaning for me and reference painful periods in my life in which I used art making as a kind of catharsis. Presently, I am creating self-portraits that seem more concrete because they are more naturalistic renditions of my full body and self. These drawings show the conflict I feel of both wanting to be the ideal as well as wanting to terminate that ideal. By exploring the many different ways of representing myself, I am showing how the idea of beauty is subjective. I am illustrating that these different images are actually various realities and while some may be considered unattractive or even disturbing, they are beautiful to me because of their truth.

The idea of truth in art is interesting to me. Through making this very personal art, I am discovering the truth about myself. What I have found is that there are many "truths". I use myself to make this work because I feel more comfortable and free to manipulate an image of myself more so than if I were representing another person.

For an artwork to be interesting to me, it needs to be expressive. I am drawn to artists who want to depict more than a pretty object and Alice Neel is one such artist. Neel cared about her art because she said it was "the thing that always made me happiest in the world" (Stiles and Selz, 213) and she considered art to be a "great communication" (Stiles and Selz, 214). Her art has to do with her drive to reveal the truth, and even though her portraits can only tell her truth, they are intriguing to the viewer as well. Using both her own experiences as well as exploring other people's personalities, she speaks of the human condition. Certain events in her life surrounding her role as wife, mother, and artist caused her great pain, and she expressed these conflicts in her work. Specifically in the images Degenerate Madonna (1930) and Futility of Effort (1930), she portrays the emotions experienced in losing a child. Neel creates images with a stark reality; she never simply painted a portrait but revealed "the specifics of their personalities and of their places in the world" (Hills, 187). Particularly valuable to me is her self-portrait, made in 1980, when she was 80 years old. The painting has nothing to do with representing an "ideal," classical, feminine beauty. Instead she depicts herself with flab and wrinkles. In fact, the whole painting exaggerates the effects of gravity on her aging body in her use of lines that pull the eye downward. There is a power and beauty about this painting because it is so painfully truthful. She painted what she saw in the mirror, but transcended that aging appearance by expressing the youth that she felt by using bright colors and vibrant lines. My earlier drawings resemble Alice Neel's work in the way I drew the forms and how I dealt with the background. I used strong, bright colors and outlined the forms similar to hers. I exaggerated some aspects of the form, and ignored others, signaling to the viewer where I wanted them to look. I still have some of those sensibilities (for example, I still use the outlines), but I am making a more cohesive picture. I now stand the figures in corners of rooms and use the walls, through color and texture, to add information about the feeling of the work.

Some of my self-portraits, like Neel's, go against the traditional notion of the male artist creating a work of art that depicts an ideal woman. To illustrate what the term "ideal" means, I use definitions from the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (Fourth Edition): "Conforming to an ultimate form or standard of perfection or excellence Lacking practicality or the possibility of realization." These words describe what I think about the ideal image of woman. In my work, I show the absurdity of the notion of the ideal female and how it turns women into objects of beauty instead of allowing them to be themselves.

Another artist whose speaks out against the narrow view of woman is Nancy Spero (born in 1926). Spero primarily uses the female figure and explores women's oppression as well as giving her figures power and freedom over that by representing them dancing, laughing or working. There is a universality to her art because she represents women of different cultures and times as well as showing them in different states of being. While I don't make art in the same manner as Spero, I have intentions similar to hers. For example, Spero shows how it is possible to refigure "the audience as female, as if we too can assume the controlling gaze" (Isaak and Lotringer, 35). She does so in a work such as "Audience II", which depicts a repeated figure of a woman from the 1930s, smoking, and looking out on the viewer from all sides of the image. Spero uses the female figure because she says "to use the body embodies an ideaThe body is a symbol or a hieroglyph, in a sense, an extension of languageI want the idea of a woman's body to transcend that which is a male ideal of women in a man-controlled world" (Stiles and Selz, 246). In contrast to Spero, I represent the body in a literal sense, not as a "symbol". However, like Spero, I also want to reclaim the image of my body on my own terms. In the same way that I care about Neel's skill in depicting a person, not just a beautiful image, I admire Spero's powerful women because they too transcend that traditional notion of "woman".

Women, in American society, have traditionally been defined by their roles in pleasing others, specifically men. I am concerned when a woman is perceived to function only as the object of beauty and how that complicates my position as a female artist. Even after all of the efforts of the women's movement, we still see images of imbalance of power in the relations between men and women as well as differences in how each are represented. Unfortunately, one very influential source for this imagery is women's magazines because they are "key transmitters of values, attitudes, information, and the latest consensus about appropriate behavior" (Jagger and Rothenberg, 10). The interesting aspect of women's magazines, however, is the fact that even though women may criticize them, we still read them. I find myself asking why I buy these magazines when I know that some of the messages they are sending are deleterious to women. This question is hard to answer but it has to with the fact that it is hard to outright reject an ideal that has been ingrained in one's mind since youth.

The media depictions of the ideal female are a contributing factor to my body image confusion. How we see ourselves has a lot to do with how our society represents us "in medical practice, and in the multi-billion dollar pornography, fashion and cosmetic industries" (Macdonald, 193). We have learned, beginning in childhood, how to be feminine. That femininity has to do with not how the body works (as masculinity functions) but how the body looks according to men (Macdonald, 194). The definition of femininity varies in each culture because we are born female or male, not masculine or feminine (Jagger and Rothenberg, 454). Being feminine means what the society's standards are for a woman at that time. In our society, looking at magazines, television, and movies, we find what is considered beautiful.

Evidence of the subjectivity of femininity is found in how the standards have evolved over time, according to the fashion of the day. Achieving the ideal now becomes a hybrid and contradictory mix of rigorous bodily control and playful experimentation with dress, make-up and accessories (Macdonald, 199). Women go to great lengths to keep themselves beautiful, in body and face. The female body has been the site of fashion just as clothes have in that the type of body considered beautiful by our society changes. The women during the Renaissance were full-bodied, while in Victorian times corsets were used to create the perfect hour-glass figure. This change continues throughout the 20th Century with the slender figure of the 1920's and 1930's and then reaching a height of voluptuous curves during the 1950's. The 1960's brought about the skinny look again as exemplified by Twiggy (Macdonald, 1970). This impossibly thin body has remained in fashion, with the model Kate Moss of the 1990's emulating the Twiggy look.

In my work I depict my conflicting feelings about my body. For example, in a work I called real/ideal, I have a pastel drawing of myself that I tried to draw somewhat naturalistically next to a drawing of an image of an ideal woman. In this work, I am admitting to the fact that I do compare myself to others, while also showing myself, and the viewer, that this is unhealthy.

I am engaged with work that deals with body issues and I find these issues in the work of the British painter, Jenny Saville (born in 1970). Her paintings have the quality of swaying between the extremes of revealing the self and being self-conscious (Nochlin, Gender Nirvana 96). Saville uses her own body and other photographic references, seemingly "struggling to convince herself that the parts of her body are beautiful" (Kuspit, 47). Fulcrum (1999) depicts three huge women on top of one another, tied like slabs of meat at a butchers, making us recognize the fact that we live in a thin-obsessed society, and causing us to question our obsession with and consumption of the ideal beauty. They invade our space, seeming to jump off the canvas. They are very real and felt as a result of their size (Fulcrum is 16 feet wide) as well as the way they are painted.

My self-portraits are confrontive, they are close to life-size, the body taking up the frontal space of the picture plane, with vibrant colors and lines that demand the viewer to look. Jenny Saville paints images of big women (to our society's present standards), showing them in various stages of obsession concerning their bodies such as pinching a chunk of fat, or with lines drawn on their body for liposuction. Like Saville, I show the anxiety I feel about my body. I depict the ways women use devices such as make-up and dress and how this become signs of who they are. As a result of these signs, women can't just be themselves but instead become what they wear. An artwork that I made entitled "Man-made" describes these issues. I place three women on stage, in front of a bright red curtain, referencing the beauty contests that persist in our culture today. Exposed in their underwear, they are variously constricted both by their own doing (by entangling their legs and arms) and by the hands of another (being tied up). They are doll-like and are mounted on stands just as Barbie comes in her packaging. I use "fake" colors as opposed to colors that look more like those seen in nature because I am signaling to the viewer that this is a fantasy. The piece describes the ambiguity I feel about my body, how I choose to dress it, and how I feel when I am being looked at. Sometimes I try to hide myself and sometimes I look straight back, as mimicked by the some of the figures looking away and by the central figure looking out and down on the viewer as if to judge in the same way that the viewer is judging.

Besides seeing the ideal woman in the media, we see her in art. Throughout history in American culture, art (specifically erotic art) has been made by men, for men. Although the situation has improved to a certain extent, when we look at a painting of a male nude we don't consider it as we would a female nude. Just as in images of barely nude men in advertising, these objectified men do not function in the same manner as objectified women because they don't have to suffer the consequences that women do. Men are not likely to be raped, harassed or otherwise taken advantage of because they are the ones in the power position. It is different simply for the fact that women more than men, have been the group that has been oppressed and discriminated against in many societies throughout history (Kilbourne, 279). It is complicated for a woman to successfully paint a male nude because she has no context with which to make it in the structure of this society. Especially in the 19th century, erotic art always represented women (Nochlin, 137). There is no place for a man to be the object of desire for a woman artist or viewer because it is still ingrained in our minds that the "male image is one of power, possession and domination, and the female one of submission, passivity, and availability" (Nochlin, 142). There have been attempts at shifting this situation to a more equal footing. Alice Neel, for example, painted Joe Gould (in 1933), a male nude figure with many penises surrounding him as if to suggest his inflated ego. I have also painted a male nude as an experiment to see how viewers would react and how I would end up painting it. The result is such that the nude still seems dominant and in control as opposed to the passivity we see in erotic imagery of women. In other work that I have created, I show women trapped in the position of sexual object and desiring to be free from this position of passivity to one in which she is in full control of her sexuality. I show the absurdity of allowing women to only function as the object of a man's sexual desire. As a woman artist, I complicate this position by being both the object when I paint self-portraits, as well as the artist. In creating a self-portrait, I am in control of how I am seen. I have the power to depict myself in any way that I wish. In drawing a nude self-portrait, I am forcing myself to declare acceptance of myself, but I also show the fact that I don't completely want others to have access to the viewing my naked body. In some portraits, I literally shield parts of my body from the voyeuristic gaze, while in others, I boldly stand naked, indifferent to the viewer's judging eyes. In representing how I feel both the conflict of both wanting to be the ideal as well as wanting to sabotage that same ideal, I have similar intentions as the figurative painter, Lisa Yuskavage, born in 1962. I use humor in my work, like she does, as can be seen in the way she toys with the concept of the gaze, at once making a parody and being both the object of the gaze as well as the one gazing (as I do when creating my self-portraits). Looking at her paintings incites an array of reactions because her work seems very sexual. However, it is not pornographic because it is so "fake" (for example, the women have improbable proportions) and humorous (they sometimes have huge, misshapen nipples and almost always have tan lines). By fake I mean the colors she uses are very intense and more like those you would see in a box of candy than in natural skin color. Even though she doesn't actually look at herself in the mirror and paint, she has said that her paintings are all self-portraits in some way (Schjedahl, 139). Her work combines aspects of traditional art in history as well as the language of popular culture (Seigel, 157). This language has to with highly charged sexual content along with intense hues. She uses loud, hot color as well as using tricks to keep herself interested like employing the color schemes of Laura Ashley because "she fantasized that her therapist wore Laura Ashley clothing" (Siegel, 158). She references her therapist in the painting Transference Portrait of My Shrink in Her Starched Nightgown with My Face and her Hair (1995). In this painting, she combines features of her own as well as those of her therapist which describes her interest in the subconscious on many levels especially when she turns this image into a sort of icon that runs throughout her work. This figure turns into a statue in Manifest Destiny (1998) and acts like a stabilizing, neutral, judging figure in the other painting titled Bad Habits (1996). Yuskavage usually makes the figure the important part of the picture, while the background fades into non-existence which can be seen in the work I mentioned above called Transference Portrait. The figure is in the center, and the light, hazy, blue nightgown fades into the same-colored walls and floor. I am also drawn to this painting because of how she has placed the figure into the corner, which is something I have been doing with my self-portraits. The space around Yuskavage's figure becomes more of a state of mind than an actual place, just as in with my drawings in the corner. I am using the corner as a metaphor for the opposing feelings I have as well as the way I feel "backed into a corner" sometimes when making decisions.

An artist also dealing with the female figure, who is about the same age as Yuskavage (in fact they both received their MFA's at Yale in 1986), is John Currin. I include Currin in my discussion because he is making fun of the male gaze, thereby making fun of himself. Some of his earlier paintings of women seemed very disturbing and misogynistic with their huge breasts, playboy pinup look, and kitsch quality. However, Currin actually says that "My most sexiest-looking paintings are, in fact, my most anti-male" (Saltz, 77). In an apparent contradiction, he admits that he painted those out of anger stemming from some personal experiences with women. Since his marriage, his style of painting has become more subdued. His colors and brushstrokes are more refined and delicate and the women have become more idealized. His painting of his wife is perhaps the best example of this more recent work. Instead of the harsh and overdone sexuality of the earlier paintings, Looking Directly into the Face of Love: Rachel and Butterflies (1999) shows his wife as a kind of contemporary Venus, softly contoured and smiling pleasantly, raising her hand as if in a blessing. As with his other portraits, she too is a mix of body types that can be found represented throughout art history such as those of Botticelli and Pontormo. By using art history as well as contemporary images from magazines, he references the ideal female. However, unlike the other artists I am involved with, he is painting from a male perspective and most of his paintings seem to be less densely layered than the women artists work. His work doesn't stray too far away from the traditional voyeuristic images of women painted by male artists, and in this way I contrast my work to his because I am creating images of a woman, from a woman's perspective, showing that she can be more than a pretty image.

For me, art is more than a beautiful object to hang on the wall. It is a vehicle for understanding myself. While the artists I admire don't explicitly say that their art is a kind of therapy for them, I see aspects of this in their work. John Currin describes how he painted out of frustration that he had about women, Jenny Saville makes self-portraits that show her speaking out about issues with her body, Lisa Yuskavage creates distorted figures that depict anxieties she has with certain parts of her body and actually references her therapy, and Spero's work, while it is more political, shows her concerns about how women are viewed. All of these artists are expressing themselves through the medium of art, and they are all using the female body to do it. I use the female form, specifically mine, to discuss the issues I have with my body and how those issues are related to society's views about women. I use art as a kind of therapy, decoding secret messages in my work to find an underlying truth just as I can decode my dreams. When I display my art in front of an audience, they too can engage in the decoding process. I can communicate very personal things while reaching others in ways that I may not even realize. Besides an artwork being beautiful to look at, it can become more interesting when the viewer wonders what the artist was thinking when she made it. By making this kind of work, I am both working through my issues as well as stirring the viewer to look at the issues in a new light. I am describing my perspective to the world and asking the world what they think.

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