BlueStockings

First Layer: The Muse

I began this painting in a figure painting class. Both models across the four week course had been women, both being politely directed into unnatural poses by our instructor to make the shapes and shadows of their bodies more interesting to paint. I had, in my fleshing out of the figure on my canvas, inadvertently pulled the hips of the figure forward, making her appear as though perching tentatively on the edge of the seat she was arranged on. When I pointed this out to the instructor, she conceded that this did make the figure look a little uncomfortable in her pose. I flashed a wry smile and replied, “I suppose that’s like most classical art, isn’t it? All those nude women reclining in unnatural and uncomfortable poses.” What an uncanny thing it was, we four female students studying the female form under the guidance of our female maestra, emulating an enduring tradition of women’s bodies as subject, object, muse, art. 

Second Layer: Pluralism

I had no real plan for this piece when I brought it home with me; the space surrounding the rendered figure still line sketches on white canvas. The first decision I made was to substitute the stool my demure figure rested her pretty head on with another person. I decided this second figure should also be a woman. I wanted to complicate the scene, add something disruptive and jarring to remove it from the canonical depictions of decorative female nudes. I also wanted to buck the objectification of such figures. The vague intention to render something of the human and complex ways women relate to each other began to crystallise. 

At first, I considered giving the second figure white or grey hair, to suggest a relationship between the figures akin to mother-daughter, as this would satisfy both of my nascent motivations to resist simplistic sexualisation of the figures, and to explore relationships between women. I have recently been preoccupied with my relationship with my own mother – the turn-taking in how we alternately hold each other up and let each other down; the relationship both more fraught and more intimate than that with my father. A tie built on pain and betrayal as much as love and solidarity. Not just a filial/maternal relationship, but a relationship between woman and woman – embodying an often conflicted plurality. 

White hair felt like too narrow a choice, though; something that would one-dimensionally code the way the figures interact in the image as a narrative on intergenerational exchange. I opted instead to give the supporting figure hair the same colour as the first figure, as I felt this was the most ambiguous (and thus most universal) choice. They could still be related – mother and daughter, sisters, cousins. They could also be lovers, friends, strangers, woman and woman – the hair colour simply a coincidence. They are all of these things, and hold the conflicting plural significances of all of these interpretations. This pluralism is what I associate with my relationships with other women, and it is what I most wanted to convey in inserting this second figure.

Layer 3: Gaze and Gender

The supporting figure herself is jarring in various ways, as intended. The way she bends is discomfiting – both for the figure herself, and for the viewer. The reclining figure looks pensive and languid, contrasting with the contorted, compacted body she rests upon. The second figure resists the historically popular genre of ‘pretty young nude muses frolicking together in an aesthetically pleasing way’. Her body is nude, and like much classical art it is arranged in an unnatural and uncomfortable way – and yet not for the viewer’s pleasure and comfort, as it is in said classical art. It is uncomfortable and unnatural for both subject and consumer, and this is what challenges the canonical tradition.

The viewer also cannot see her face – we are denied insight into her mood. She is unreadable. She may be euphoric, she may be pained, she may be bored. One can interpret as one likes – choose to make her happy, in love, entirely at ease. But because her face is hidden, one cannot entirely erase uncertainty, and therefore also doubt. The inability to see her face, and also much of her body, also makes her effectively ungenderable – that is, you also cannot conclusively assign her a gender as a viewer (I appreciate the irony in my continued use of ‘she’ and ‘her’ to refer to such a figure). 

While this is ultimately a piece I painted with the intention of depicting relationships between women, I do think that the gender trouble this figure introduces actually enriches the meaning – particularly as someone who personally identifies as non-binary, but also still speaks of myself through the label and lens of “woman”, to describe how I am socialised, perceived and treated in this world. The plurality and contradiction of my own self-identification seems to have bled into this scene. In fact it is my own bent, ambiguous body – at once genderless and female – inserted into the diegesis of the piece, as searching on the internet for reference photos of “nude woman bent over” unsurprisingly gave me almost no useful references amongst a sea of soft porn ass and crotch shots. 

This ambiguity surrounding the figure’s demeanour and gender helps to build a world in this painting that complicates heteronormative, binary ideas of gender, intimacy, sexuality, and relationships between women. These women are nude together, sharing a moment of physical intimacy, yet it is deliberately not formulated for the male gaze.

Fourth Layer: Negative Space

It was interesting to seek out responses from friends and family at this stage of the process, the piece arguably complete. I anticipated my parents’ response to the painting, as a piece that resists putting the viewer at ease or providing them a straightforward interpretation, and sent it on the family chat making the disclaimer that it might appear unnerving, despite my intention to depict intimacy. I predicted my parents’ response correctly, and they agreed with the label of unnerving. I suppose really that for a family that still finds vulnerability and unbridled affection with one another an unnatural and awkward affair, that it is right that they would respond this way to a portrayal of a literal naked closeness. 

In contrast, my sister identified with the positive in the painting – describing the scene as familiar, comfortable, playful. I couldn’t help but think that my sister’s queerness informed her response – the piece is after all inadvertently a portrait rendered through the filter of my own particular queer identities. Making the subtleties of queer experience the centrepiece of a painting is akin to asking the viewer to primarily engage with the negative space of an image. There is a cognitive dissonance when the default is a heteronormative gaze; the same trick of manipulating one’s vision to discern an optical illusion hidden within the main pattern. I think my sister and I are more practised in this change of focus, and this might inform our reading with the figures in the piece, where our parents instinctively read against them. 

I enjoyed the spectrum of response the piece engendered from those who saw it. All of the various interpretations were correct – while the scene is of intimacy, trust, connection, and support, one figure is apparently putting themselves in physical discomfort to support the other, which creates an imbalance in the dynamic. Relationships are complex, and I think I have been both the woman supported at the cost of another’s discomfort and sacrifice, and also the one in discomfort making the sacrifice to support another. However, even so it still did not feel quite complete to me yet. The themes existed in the piece, but were unfocused. Ambiguity is itself a feature of the piece, but I felt that I could use the empty, neutral expanse of wall behind the figures to better frame the key mood and theme of the piece.

Fifth Layer: A Feminocentric Focus

I decided to complete the scene with a painting-within-a-painting, because I felt this would be a way I could better highlight the themes that should be understood as most significant without breaking the diegesis of the world the figures inhabit in the painting. It also acted as a nod to the ways in which this piece is a response to, or evolution of, the artistic tradition of the nude – the ostentatious gilt frame also serves to reference this history. I cycled through a few ideas for the subject of the wall painting. Orchids; as a nod to the popular analogy between people predisposed to a heightened level of sensitivity (historically a label that women have borne), and the notoriously sensitive plant. Britney Spears shaving her head; to highlight more the rejection of the male gaze and subversion of aesthetic dictates. A classical painting of a moment of platonic female intimacy; to acknowledge the long history of female muses that inform this painting, but also to underline affection and intimacy between women as the overarching theme of the piece. Each would have shifted the tone and reading of the painting toward their own meanings.

While I opted for the latter of the three ideas, I struggled at first to find anything that fit my requirements. Classical paintings of women together may sometimes be intimate in that they show women nude together, but rarely is that something shared between the women. It is the vast difference between surface exposure and a genuine vulnerability. Women are often exposed or on display in classical paintings, but not in fact sharing any real closeness or vulnerability. Depictions of overt intimacy and affection shared between women in classical paintings are close to none, aside from the occasional painting of a mother and a young child. 

I eventually sourced and chose to paint a section taken from a fairly obscure piece by late 19^th century Pre-Raphaelite painter Simeon Solomon. In the painting, a young woman sits on another young woman’s lap, one arm around her neck, the other hand held in the hand of the second young woman, while they listen attentively to their friend’s tales. The intimacy of their arrangement is almost incidental to the painting – they simply happened to be so intertwined as they listened. But it was exactly because this was an incidental moment of intimacy that it struck me as a moment of genuine intimacy and affection between two women outside of the usual heteronormative sensibilities. The closeness of their bodies, the arm around the neck, hand in hand – these were the details I wanted to highlight. 

I chose to cut out the faces to avoid the individual and specific, and instead emphasise the focus as the physical support, proximity and connection of the women in the painting, mirroring and hopefully enhancing the same things in the nude figures. I wanted the focus to be what is shared between the female figures, not simply a reaction to or subversion of the heteronormative tradition. This might sound a very trivial distinction, but I consider it central to the painting. The point is not a reaction against the heteronormative, but the focus on the feminocentric. 

Simeon Solomon, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Final Product: Tension, Intimacy

While the warmth of the scene borrowed from Solomon I hope suggests as intended a focus on affection and closeness, I enjoy that there is still both intimacy and tension in the piece, and I enjoy that they each inform and influence the other. The intimacy for example creates tension, because of the various ambiguities and pluralities of the figures. It is at once platonic/familial and romantic/sexual, depending on how one reads it. I recently came across the concept of the lesbian continuum when mentioned anecdotally by Dr Celia Caputi on a podcast I often listen to while painting. Coined by Adrienne Rich, the lesbian continuum posits that “in a patriarchal, heterosexist culture where women are fully responsible for caring for infants, every child, every infant’s first love is his or her mother. And so that for women, the initial disposition is same-sex love, and that heterosexist culture forces a woman to realign herself.” It also however “include[s] the sharing of a rich inner life, the bonding against male tyranny, [and] the giving and receiving of practical and political support [..]” In this way, the boundaries between the categories of intimacy between women are blurred.  

I am myself asexual, which means platonic love overlaps with romantic love for me. I often cite my older sister as my first love, and the ending of the particular closeness we shared when growing up together as my first heartbreak. The second great love of my life was an intense platonic friendship in university. The tension and intimacy of the scene, between the figures, I hope captures all of this – the support, the solidarity, the interdependence, the vulnerability and closeness; the multiple and multifaceted ways in which women can and do love and relate to each other. The surprising and complex intersections and mergence within the sphere of intimacy of the platonic, romantic, and sexual.

e.e. black