Her body (UN)seen
A rant on religion, renaissance and…um, quantum mechanics
I am fascinated by the art historical genre of the female nude reclining in a landscape. Botticcelli or Titian maybe made our Renaissance version of porn, many of our most celebrated paintings hung in bedrooms for private pleasure Compositions were often set up from the view of a secret male viewer stumbling upon a nymph or goddess bathing. I love these classical works telling the stories of Greek mythology (to the point where they are really a blue print of my own image making/story telling), But i don’t have a male gaze; I like these them because I identify with the heroine—and through the power of figurative painting I have a visceral sense of my own form. Goddess’ have been present in art since it began, but at one point they became worshipped more for beauty than power. Perhaps these shifts in representation evolved alongside the development of monotheistic religion? Our projection of an all powerful man in the sky, stole the blood heart of spirituality because it doesn’t acknowledge a universe evolving. It took nature out of god, which means it took witches, shamans, and animal spirits. Though I admire much of Jesus’ message, Christianity left women in a whore/saint, sacred/profane prison, with no allowance for an authentic feminine wild nature, and we’ve been trapped in an alien structure since. If the masculine seeks objective outcomes, structures and accomplishment, the feminine is oriented toward process, receiving, growth and mutuality. (Please note: I am not referring to gender—as both sexes slide along the spectrum). Feminine qualities of growth, process, slowness, receptivity and cooperation are always devalued in current society. Ancient cultures honored the divine feminine for a millenia before oppressed violence began developing in classical greek and roman times, and calcifying in judeo christian ethos. It is interesting that women are more associated to our bodies, as any media figure will tell you. While influential women deserve to be free from a destructive and painful patriarchal gaze, perhaps there is some truth that women inhabit their bodies more than men. Our body (of both sexes) is a source of intelligence and wisdom, intuition and insight. Prioritizing intellectual analysis, while serving an important purpose, can at times be of great disservice. Our bodies are finely tuned instruments which tell you when to run, to speak up, set a boundary or open for an embrace. But what is a body? It is an extraordinary electro-chemical machine with amazing healing abilities, with a mysterious ability for reflexive self awareness acting as our sensory node to the outside world, interpreting and communicating with other entities. We have feet to feel the ground underneath, and a tongue to detect nourishing nectar, but maybe a body is even more than that. Yogic practices which go back before monotheistic religion show us the ‘subtle body’ the psychosomatic forces which can be felt through directed focus and attention. Quantum theory substantiates subatomic particles as perhaps not even the smallest unit of matter, and this is what our bodies are composed of alongside everything. Humans can imagine, and contain a raucus of ideas and feelings all while standing, walking running, or growing a baby. You know how you always feel someone looking at you, or get caught gazing at the driver in a car in the next lane? Perhaps humans can sense subtle forces that our technology yet cannot. There is tremendous wisdom in our mysterious bodies, made out the stuff of this earth, and I guess in order to dodge a problemetised history of representing the female form, I am focusing more on the emotional energy through color, as though I were looking at it with a CAT scan or radiograph.
object/image
Paintings as we know are more than the sum of their parts, they transcend their object-hood to enter the realm of the symbolic psyche, or the metaphysical mind-scape. One of my favorite painters Paul Nash, calls a painting an “imaginative event".” I agree with this because paintings emerge from the psyche, as submerged unconscious material bubbles to the surface. However, I would also say that painting is an action, a force from our bodies onto an object, Delueze talks about this in his book about Francis Bacon—that painting is about sensation, which speaks to us as bodies. I work within the internal logic of a digital collage process, and I am fascinated by how I can emulate a virtual aesthetic, but also diverge with the gross materiality of paint. Sometimes I follow a composition exactly and other times the image does not translate onto canvas and I have to revise. Below are some collages I made as part of my creative process. Only some of these will generate painting work, but the instant gratification of color changes, and composition editing cant be denied. I can make these speedily and the immediately show me what I am trying to say, or what I want to avoid.