"Dressed for an occasion, what impression will be left after an intensive introspection by artist of model?"
I have been contending with the `female' image since birth. My screens and filters have been greatly colored by the culture that wrought me. When mastering the use of scissors, I would sit for what seemed hours and cut out the models that were posed `femininely correct' in the Sears and Roebuck and Montgomery Ward catalogues. Exquisite figures of perfect proportion with unmarred smiling faces were dressed in just the right clothes to lead my mother and women like her to spend their husbands' money.
Since the second millennium B.C., artists, artisans, and advertisers have been depicting `feminine beauty' from the cultural viewpoint. This culture, dominated by the males who went out into the world to care for their females at home, developed a set of standards for the `gentler' sex dictating the norm for feminine behavior and appearance. Born into this `male gaze', members of the society acquire all its parameters and filters, staining their perceptions inherently.
Images of women from ancient Egypt until present emphasize the body and how it is clothed. As those images progress towards modern times, what the woman is wearing increasingly portrays who the woman is as she is expected to be. The clothing give the woman her identity and can be read as her. In today's commercial world even just a part of the body clothed in a particular article can designate a personality or character trait.
In these paintings I have staged life to get to the essence of it. When taken by an image of a particular woman or group of women, I ask them to pose for me, `dressed up'. In one corner of my studio I stage a scene to pose my figures in. As my models repeatedly come to sit our relationship develops. As I intently look at them, converse with them and paint them, the woman's truth is revealed on the canvas. The products of that intimate process are the paintings that hang in this gallery.
"the work by a great artist penetrates the soul, even when we don't want it too." (Julian Barnes on Bonnard, "Interior World", Art in America, August 1998)
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