“The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable.”
Nature, 1836, Ralph Waldo Emerson
This body of work is a voyeuristic self-remembering, using both the personal (self) image and the conjured public image sourced via stock photo. Questioning notions of camouflage, disappearance and privacy, the compositions largely reference the western canon of the female nude;
Venus of Urbino, Vecellio Tiziano, 1538
Olympia, Édouard Manet 1865
Autumn, Frieseke, 1914
The Future Unveiled, Suzanne Valadon, 1912
Nevermore, O’ Tahiti, Paul Gauguin, 1897
The Naked Maja, Goya, 1797
In the nature of its application to the canvas, the personal photo disintegrates, leaving holes to be filled by incantation and strangenesses. The process of painting over is obscuring, censoring, hiding from you the viewer. Relationships between body and the vegetable, complicate the invasive gaze, camouflaging the subject. Hiding is expressed in these ways:
- Ornate pattern
- The merging of body with plantlife
- Poor resolution
- The overgrown garden
- Disintegration of material due to non archival processes
- The grid
- Generalized objects harvested from the garden of internet images
- Small Precious objects and creatures painted with clarity against an atmospheric body
Privacy, from the violence of being seen, can be found in the ways in which women mythologically are rendered into nature itself as protection from gaze (to be closer to nature) is also to be further from man (god)
“Cover me, O mother Earth!
Destroy the beauty that has injured me,
or change the body that destroys my life.”
Ovid, Metamorphoses