This Semester's Work Part One

I started this semester off thinking that I knew exactly what I wanted to do. Last semester (spring '13), I had spent most of semester really confused and was forcing out work, however I was finally able to make one really great, successful piece at the very end of the semester; and 5 foot tall painting of a woman's back in hard edge.  Originally I was focusing on the aspect of portraying plus size women as goddesses and it turned way too kitschy for me and it made the women look like mythical creatures which I didn't want. I want my figures to say "I'm here now, an I'm not going away". So I was working with making my figures larger than life when I was just drawing and I "what would happen if" I drew the figure in hard edge. And it's kinda symbolic of being forceful in wanting to not be told to be that they must change themselves to be considered sexy. I continued working with the hard edged figures well into this semester and spent three weeks working with it exclusively. 

While I did enjoy creating this, I began feeling lost and burnt out of the idea of hard edge, as well as believing there was a better way to portray the overwhelming theme in my work, rather than reducing the female body into a system of straight lines.

Inspirational Artist Spotlight:Jenny Saville

Jenny Saville is a contemporary British painter, famous for large scale depictions of nude women. Saville gained her art degree at the Glasgow School of Art in 1992, but was later offered a six month scholarship to attend the University of Cincinnati’s DAAP program, where she states that she saw "Lots of big women. Big white flesh in shorts and T-shirts. It was good to see because they had the physicality that I was interested in"

After completing her post graduate degree at Slade School of Fine Art, Jenny quickly rose to fame when one of England’s top collectors, Charles Saatchi, bought the entirety of her senior show and supported for 18 months, while she created new works that he in turn displayed at the Saatchi Gallery in London. Shortly after her contract with Saatchi ended, Saville emerged as a Young British Artist (YBA) and is now widely considered to be an abject artist because of the controversial subject matter that she deals with. She credits that her feminist subject matter of nude obese women with often obscured or erased faces to her time spent in America, specifically of her time in Cincinnati at DAAP.

Since her debut in 1992, Saville's focus has remained on the female body, slightly deviating into subjects with "floating or in determinant gender," painting large scale paintings of transgender people. Her published sketches and documents include surgical photographs of liposuction, trauma victims, deformity correction, disease states and transgender patients.

Although Saville lives and works in Oxford, England, she has said that she prefers to show in America.  "It is odd to be showing in Britain. I've been shown a lot in America; that's my favorite place to show. We're quite conceptually driven in Britain. There's less guilt about being a painter over there."

My work is very similar to Jenny Saville, My work is also of a feminist subject matter, dealing with ideas of body positivity, body image, societal beauty standards and sexuality and I achieve this by depicting the fat female form in acrylic paint, digital mediums, pastels and colored pencils. I am really obsessed with the physicality of rolling flesh and portraying beauty in the things that much of society deems ugly. Saville works in a similar way, although her work is less about trying to change society like I am, but rather she portrays women because she is fascinated by them and their figures. 

Inspirational Artist Snapshot: Jenny Roesel Ustick

Jenny Ustick. What can I say about Jenny Ustick. If any teacher has ever provided me with the best guidance, had the best understanding of my work and pushed me the furthest both visually and conceptually, it has to be Jenny. Between the two drawing classes I've taken with Jenny, we have cultivated a great relationship and she has provided me endless instruction, inspiration and resources to continue pushing my work further, so that my work is not only strong conceptually, but also technically.

Jenny currently teaches several classes at the University of Cincinnati, ranging from introductory level art studies all the way up to senior level classes, including Senior Thesis, which I have the honor of taking with her next semester. She also owns a brewery, is a working artist as well as a cancer survivor.

Body Positive Yoga

Late last year I took a yoga class as part of essentially "practicing what I preach". I wanted to put my radical self love to work in my life and what I found was that yoga only made me appreciate my body even more and love what it was capable of. The only problem was that I was one of the very few plus sized women in that class and I certainly was the biggest, and while I could do nearly every pose quite well, there were some poses that I could not do, not because I was incapable or not flexible enough, but because my belly got in the way. So instead of hating my belly, and therefore going against everything I stand for and make work about, I turned to this wonderful resource called Body Positive Yoga which not only empowered to keep loving my body but also showed me other poses I could do to get the same stretch but not be mad at my belly and showed me beautiful pictures of gorgeous, fat women doing poses that many thinner people cannot due. This heightened awareness of self has inspired me greatly over the past year and continues to do so today.

Dances With Fat

One of the other website that provides me with endless information and inspiration is a blog run by the wonderful Ragen Chastain. DWF daily discusses and argues that you can be both fat AND healthy. Chastain is considered to be 'super obese' yet she is considered extremely healthy and named her blog because she is an incredible dancer. I love reading her articles and seeing pictures of her doing standing toe touches, but my favorite part is her 'read my hate mail' section. She actually posts the hurtful comments and ignorance driven hate mail that she receives. She take these terrible comments and advertises on the page so that her hate mail actually pays her, which is wonderful because it is, in a sense, a proverbial slap in the face to the people who sent them originally.

Adipositivity

ad·i·pose

[ad-uh-pohs]

adjective

1.

fatty; consisting of, resembling, or relating to fat.

pos·i·tiv·i·ty

[poz-i-tiv-i-tee]  Show IPA

noun, plural pos·i·tiv·i·ties.

1.

the state or character of being positive: a positivity that accepts the world as it is.

The Adipositivity Project is a website that has given me a lot of inspiration of the last semester. At adipositivity, they post a lot of pictures of both women and men of all ages and races who have proudly accepted their bodies and show them proudly for everyone. This is in direct contrast that people who's bodies that are big are automatically deemed ugly, when in all actually, all bodies are beautiful. I was introduced to this wonderful website when I showed my work to my senior thesis class at the beginning of the semester. A classmate suggested I check it out and upon doing so I ended up finding some of very valuable inspiration that I needed desperately this semester.

Currently, the Adipositivity website is down due to a computer crash and has been down since the end of August. However much of website's previous content has since been posted on tumblr, which I follow regularly. 

Yikes....

This semester has been extremely stressful. I have fallen extremely behind in posting regularly on this blog, but I did post a lot on my personal blog about how was I was feeling, so this week I will be posting a lot this week to catch up. So sit back, buckle up and get ready for a run down of how my semester has been treating me artistically, emotionally and mentally.