Damn braces: Bless relaxes
William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
In life, corpulence signifies consumption of poverty junk food, poor choices, inertia and/or genetic predisposition. In art, it’s an opportunity. Figures who earn the space they consume are heroes.
Art began with fat people. The Venus of Willendorf was carved in limestone at least 24,000 years ago. Among painters, Rubens stands out, which is where
the complimentary adjective, Rubenesque, came from, although it doesn’t apply to his men. His fat women are voluptuous, while their fat male
companions are dim or funny in a Falstaffian vein, except for his gravely dignified Bacchus.
Lucien Freud also paints girth in both men and women; Jenny
Saville, women only, and Catherine Opie, photographing herself.
Where are we now?
Mark Takamichi Miller paints from discarded or lost photos – prints never picked up from the drug store or undeveloped rolls he finds by accident. I love his blond woman in a baseball cap from 2003. She averts her eyes, as if the process of being in the frame is barely endurable, but she wears lipstick and sports a floral necklace in the grizzled folds of her neck.
Brian Murphy has made a career of painting himself as a massive volume with no weight. His image in watercolors is large and leaky, the brown of his beard underlining the sand-pink cloud of his face. He’s a tempest of his own making, creating weather states as self-portraits. Because you can see through them, they’re apparitional, an insubstantial pageant ready to melt into colored air.
Using watercolor and graphite, Geoffrey Chadsey is all about attitude. His work is delicate but packs a punch.
John Feodorov ‘s fat people live in their heads; in dreams they avoid responsibility.
To paraphrase Carl Dennis: Chewed by his appetites, he chews his prey. (1) Takeshi Murata (2) Jim Woodring
Also, Donnabelle Casis, free-floating fat in oil paint, here.
Brian Murphy’s paintings are so gorgeous they make me want seconds.
Implicit in these images is the simultaneous disgust and attraction that the sight of fat humans arouses. We judge in fat people what we judge about ourselves, but at the end of the day we can’t tear our eyes away (and are more than a little jealous, perhaps, at the abandon with which they seem to regard the strictures of decorum we prop ourselves up with.)
Life, it seems, imitates art: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwMbJ68IbAM (I apologize if passing along this voyeuristic schlock is in poor taste, but I’m not the one who filmed this segment for television, for the love of God!)
Models who are fat are more interesting to draw, as are very skinny models. (I use “model” as whoever the artist is using as subject.)
Has “beauty” been considered differently in photography during it’s albeit briefer history than painting? Sculpture? (I shall read the posting on sexist sculpture in re H. Moore after this.)
A particular “beef” of mine, has been painting and sculpture of women sans heads. The whole body except for a head. I didn’t mind the photos you recently posted without heads/faces because it made sense as it was real folks and possibly omitting identity.
Finally, “fat” is cultural- to time, place and culture. Being fat, or fear of, seems to be US fashion influenced among middle class and wealthy people. Definitely coastal cities.
I was camping (under protest) in Quebec province, in the Laurentides Mts. in the early 1970s, at the part of the map where there were no more cities north of there. But, not far away, there was a shopping mall. I was immediately surprised by how much heavier the women were than me.
G. Chadsey’s drawing, “Boxer” is very pleasing.
I completely agree with Emily that Brian’s watercolours make my heart melt.
And Jeanne Dunning …. !!!