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 VENUS REVEALED / forbidden fruit
Last
year I began a series using 'Venus/Aphrodite' as a springboard for
exploring femaleness... along with love, and comfort of the earth, and
gentleness. I began with a figurative piece titled 'Venus
Reviled.' Then to prepare for the second piece, I did extensive photo
studies of my daughter, who is a teenager and just moving into
womanhood. She was blindfolded in the studies and the painting was
going to be called 'Venus Revealed.'
But somehow I just couldn't do the painting.
Instead I felt the need to paint the human figure as flowers... which
annoyed me greatly. Painting flowers is politically dangerous for
a female artist, playing right into cultural stereotypes. It sets you
up to be dismissed. I didn't want to do it. And of course the question
of sex and daughters and in fact femininity in our culture is fraught
with risk and objective danger. So I was facing layers of resistance as
I worked.
Nevertheless I felt impelled. I did figures as flowers and fruits, and
I included other still life elements painted and collaged from my
studio life. The collage aspect is a gentle way of bringing different
and even contradictory elements together – not battling but creating a
whole new image together. It forms a kind of pansexual merging, just as
in nature.
And the original photo-studies made their way into the paintings after
all: I realized that these were Venus revealing herself in the gentle
and dynamic way of nature, both half-hidden and right out there to be
seen. These paintings are feminine-sexual, and are superficially about
the beautiful – flowers, fruit, young girls – but I wanted them to be
also made of common, earthy substance, oil paint and photo paper,
ordinary stuff.
As always, painting leaves me with curiosity. What is revealed …and
hidden? And to whom? What is the interaction between internal and
external landscapes? What happens along those edges of resistance and
fear? Can that which has been lost spring anew?
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2015 gallery 