Thesis rough draft

Trinity Sutterfield

Senior Thesis

Thesis Rough Draft

02.02.2014

            For many years, I have been fascinated by the idea of societal beauty standards and the affect it has on the female psyche. Daily, women are faced with thousands of images and articles telling them that are not good enough, simply because they are not small enough. A quick jaunt through the grocery store checkout line reveals many magazines that profit off of making women of all sizes hate their bodies. My artwork works to rebel against this. I aim to cause social change. It is for this reason that I call myself a feminist activist artist. As a whole, my work focuses on body image, societal beauty standards and defying them by glorifying the things that society deems ugly or undesirable. I have been focusing on this theme for nearly four years and I still hold the same fervor and passion for it that I did when I first started working with it; however my concept has matured beyond just showing that big women are beautiful to showing that all bodies are beautiful no matter their size. Daily women of all sizes are told by the media that they are ugly or unworthy of love unless they are a certain size that is achievable by less than five percent of the American population. I tend focus on bigger women because there is more of an element of rebellion there in portraying beauty in a figure that society deems ugly rather than in portraying a figure that is slightly more socially acceptable because it is smaller.

 My work explores the relationship between beauty standards and the female psyche, as well as the idea that every body is beautiful. With my figures of nude women of various sizes, portrayed in a positive light, and the accompanying imagery, and sometimes text, I am currently examining themes of body positivity, feminism and the effects of societal beauty standards on women through many mediums including drawing, painting, photography and digital editing/painting. As for my audience, I want my work to not only challenge them to think beyond what society has taught them, but I also want my work to instill a sense of anger, or rather be a call to action to rebel at the idea of women being told by society that if they are small enough, quiet enough, compliant enough and saccharine enough, you will somehow be enough. In my current work I am creating large scale paintings of nude, and often faceless, women of plus sizes, often drawing reference to the classic paintings of Venus and displayed in a positive light to show the conceptual meaning behind my work, which can be summarized into one simple statement, “all bodies are beautiful not only in spite of their size but also because of their size”.

I started working with this idea mid-way through my freshman year in DAAP when I finally had had enough. After high school, I lost more than fifty pounds in less than six months because I fell victim to what all the magazines, TV shows, and even some of my friends and family pushed down my throat; that unless I lost weight, I would be unlovable, no one would want me, that I was not a beautiful because I was too big. I was well on my way to developing an eating disorder, simply because as my weight began to come off, five to ten pounds a week, everyone cheered me on, applauded me for my “success” and encouraged me to continue. While I will never condemn someone for losing weight in a healthy manner, I will always discourage people from believing their bodies are not absolutely perfect the way they are. My work is to combat the notion that one’s worth is in direct correlation with their weight. Often times when I explain why my work and why I am fat positive, I get a variety of responses from anger to confusion. “I’m fat positive because I’m a feminist, and I refuse to acknowledge in the magical thinking that if you’re small enough, quiet enough, compliant enough and saccharine enough, you will somehow be enough” writes Lunette who runs a body positive block call YrWelcome. I will consider my work successful when I have a completed series of work and if both my colleagues in art and my friends outside the art world are able to look at my work and understand it without a lot of explanation. My work aims to change how someone thinks, so I want my work to challenge my viewers to see themselves differently and rebel simply by loving their bodies just the way they are. To quote a familiar band, Mumford and Sons, through my work I say “Lend me your eyes; I can change how you see”.

Over the past year, I have had my ups and downs as an artist. I started off the fall semester thinking that I knew exactly what I wanted to do. Near the end of my junior year, after an entire semester of creative blocks and forcing work, I was able to create one really successful piece, a five foot tall painting of a woman’s nude back in hard edge. Because of the success I had with this piece, I started my senior year continuing to work in hard edge, however after spending a significant amount of time focusing more on the mathematical precision of hard edge painting rather than on the concept of my art. I began to feel that there was better way to achieve the overwhelming theme to my work. So it was, pun intended, back to the drawing board. As the semester progressed, I began to pull away from the hard edge painting slowly; for a time I painted in “semi hard edge” and eventually stopped doing it altogether. I have since moved into this idea of painting more in the classical style, and more recently I have started referencing the work of master artists like Botticelli and famous painting like The Birth of Venus. I have really been focusing on the idea of making my paintings look very skin-like and fleshy, which portrays a realness to the audience, thus making my concept more hard hitting and harder to  ignore.

In addition to extensive technical and historical research, I have been researching my conceptual ideas in greater depth through the many body positive blogs I follow and read regularly. I have found that I get the best information and inspiration from “underground” resources because I have come to realize that this movement of body positivity is still in its early stages and the best information comes from a few individuals who have chosen to think outside of what society tells them. Some of the blogs that I read regularly are Dances With Fat, YrWelcome and Adipositivity.

As for where my work is headed in the future, including the DAAPworks show, I intend to continue painting my figures in a positive light, portraying them confidently grabbing their fleshy stomachs embracing themselves or posing them in ways that reference master artists in an attempt to convey the ideals of body positivity and self-love that I’m focusing on, to my audience. I am doing this by continuing to work on making my paint more flesh-like, researching and looking at more paintings to get more ideas on how paint can be handled by looking at different artists of the past. As it has been suggested is many of my critiques this semester, I will continue to keep pushing my works further into abstraction as well as increasing my canvas size until my figures are larger than life and invoke an imposing feeling in my audience.

            In conclusion, I will continue working with this subject of body positivity, a subject that has both fascinated and angered me. I will continue working with this idea so long as women spend hours agonizing about their weight, obsessing over diets, and literally starving themselves because they cannot achieve the golden medium that society pushes down our collective throats. and I cannot wait to see what kind of work I will create as I begin to make my paintings larger than life to invoke an angry response in my audience that will in turn challenge them to think about my concept that all bodies are beautiful not only in spite of their size but also because of their size.