The myths underpinning my most recent paintings are rooted in desire, but as basic as that impulse may be, it isn’t simple. Desire is a component of admiration and love as well as covetousness and overindulgence. My sources – tales from antiquity of pursuit and abduction – illustrate the charged complexity of wanting: wanting something beautiful, wanting to be ravished, wanting to ravish.
The fraught sensuality of these stories has been compounded, over the years, by their representation. The women in these paintings are originally from paintings by Baroque and Rococo masters such as Jacob Jordaens, Francois Boucher and Francois Lemoyne. These were artists whose great themes were pleasure, beauty and abundance; hints of refusal, fear or coercion would only spoil the party.
My work lifts these women out of their assigned roles and resettles them in less limited surroundings. One-time attendants, bathers or symbols of fertility now inhabit abstract fields of color. Swaths of oil paint and screens of gold leaf obscure their bodies. Free of context, of narrative constraints, of salacious bulls and leering satyrs, they are less iconic and more human. Their glances and gestures take on a confidential manner no longer accessible to the viewer. Their desires turn inward. But even stripped of history painting’s theatrical and symbolic conventions, my canvases retain their monumental scale and physicality. Voluptuous bodies give way to voluptuous paint. The violence of the old myths is sublimated into whirls of layered and saturated color. If there is a utopia building for these women, it’s Amazonian, not pastoral, full of a vigor and potential that keeps their newfound intimacy grand.
Is it possible to restore autonomy to these models, to whatever nuances of expression might’ve been contained in their poses? Maybe it can’t be “restored” – they’re long gone – but it can be conceived afresh. My paintings are reinventions more than corrections, assertions that those myths of control are in fact just myths, and that new truths can be found by pushing the images further into fantasy, not back toward their origins.
Painting in this way is in itself an act of distillation, boiling off the extravagance and iconography of historical sources in pursuit of more delicate, less definite, but perhaps truer relationships.
- Current Location: Angela Fraleigh Studio
- Collections: Ghosts in the Sunlight