I’ve been searching for my own definition of beauty that would be untainted by culture. As a young girl, I read many books of charming women who captivated me to the point where I wanted to resemble them. I started painting women in fantastical situations with mythic creatures. They gratified me as idealistic pretty girls who, subconsciously, I projected myself into. When the paintings revealed myself as the heroine I moved forward into painting my own experiences that were real. As I revisited my childhood I looked back to the stories that I adored so much and found a disdain within myself. With age comes discovery and what I found was that my heroines were flawed. The women I have prized were creations that were shaped by masculine society. As girls we are told to be bubbly, endearing, and eloquent and given role models who embody those accepted traits. My heroic ladies fell off their pedestals and into a sea of cultural male dominated aesthetic.
In my studio I began making paintings out of more physical materials. My hands pulled through thick wads of tinted plaster and parted the poured industrial paint, and my inner savage was fed by the interaction between my skin and the cold material. I began to understand that for me, beauty wasn’t so much as what you see but rather what you feel. I freed myself from realistic depiction and allowed the materials to naturally react to its surfaces as I took note to what they wanted to do. House paint, for example, has a heavy plastic quality. When poured onto a non-stick surface such as saran wrap it can be easily peeled off when dry. The outcome is something solid yet flexible. By using my paint pours, the substance of the art becomes the substance of the pigment. The dried paint can bend, fold, bleed, tear, and peel. The paint becomes the essence of skin through textural qualities. This allowed me to portray a body in a new and abstracted way. The paint then started to get sculptural as I began sowing the pieces together into one massive bodily form. |