Group Tutorial with Phil

Research

Having had my tutorial I’ve collected a few magazines, including the Argos catalogue, which is full to the brim of pink and blue merchandise. There’s so much reinforcement of dolls for girls and cars for boys. Beauty products for women and sporting gear for men. Women can do sport too, but obviously how we look must take precedence.

The catalogue and magazine imagery has got me thinking about symbolic meaning of objects and some of the history behind them. The changeable meaning of some of these symbols. As a consequence I’ve been looking at Renaissance portraits of women and the meaning of the pearls, lilies etc that adorn the portraits and how I might be able to appropriate some of the imagery in my own painting. To try and re-appropriate some of these symbols or use them to open up a conversation in my work.

In my sketchbook I’ve been sketching chaotic scenes of my life, adding in the lily (purity and female virginity) I want to try and indicate the absurdity of how the female gets represented in Western society. I am neither pure, or impure, nor completely good or bad.

I bought the Daily Star, that was embarrassing. It was all about Holly Walsh and her curvaceous body, not Holly Walsh and her presenting skills. It’s strange how her male colleague’s physical appearance didn’t get a mention. I need say no more.

I will continue to research ideas of femininity and how they’re represented and reinforced in art and the media.

Rosemary Betterson’s Looking on: Images of femininity in the visual arts and media is a book I will keep returning to and have made notes on in my reflective journal.

I have also discovered Linda Nochlin, she is my new hero! It’s made me feel that my sketches of the ‘family portrait’ may have legs and could be apart of the vehicle to express my frustration around the feminine. Identity is multiple and cannot be reduced to, or defined by, whether we are male or female. What is really reinforcing and selling these reductive identities in Western society? Is it really the media that drives it on and on?

How to challenge the reductive nature of femininity and masculinity?