I am in a very bad mood and what better to do than to make art which will make everybody feel bad when looking at it. Ok, maybe I overestimate the importance and impact my paintings have, but please let me remain for a bit longer in my delusion :-DDD
Do you already feel bad? No? Ok, here is my depressive explanation of my own painting. (As always, feel free to interpret it in a completely different way yourself.)
I define myself as a woman and I am getting older. Being female in this world is not the best choice and being old neither. Both together are a certain way to get sad and angry. Its like with Alice and the rabbit hole, after being down there one time you cannot unsee/unknown the things you learned. And the thing I see so often is that being a woman above the age of „fuckability“ (sorry for the rudeness) you on the one hand get invisible (near to no media representation) and on the other hand you get bombarded with messages to self optimise: use this cream to loose the wrinkles, wear this shapewear to look like a sex goddess, eat so clean you glow like a baby or even better, stop eating at all to activate natural anti-aging hormones.
But these are low grade message which permeates the daily life... my wrath was triggered yesterday by something completely different and perhaps even trivial: I started a new novel. A detective story taking place in 1920 India and the first female character was introduced with the following description „(…) and a middle-aged Indian woman entered (…) The woman was handsome for her years. Twenty years ago she’d have been considered a beauty.“ What the hell!? I thought and pondered to abandon the book instantly. First none of the male characters are measured by their beauty. Beauty for a man is not important (in this novel), only for women. And secondly the statement implies that a middle-aged woman per se cannot be beautiful, because she is middle aged.
Sigh, grumble, gag.
Perhaps I am too harsh, but as written above I went down the rabbit hole and now I cannot stop to notice how negatively women above a certain age are seen by society. And as anger seems to be my artistic drive, I started to paint a kind of modernised public shaming, a common practice in the European middles ages. Two skeletons, perhaps female, are hounded by a demonstrating and chanting mass which demands of them to „be yourself only better/thinner“ to „optimise“ to stay „forever 21“. An allusion to a constant demand of women to feel ashamed of their body and life which are either not enough or too much.
I started the painting with a sketch of the skeletons on a primed wooden board in Procreate. The next step was giving the skeletons color. At first, I used white, beige, and yellow hues to form the bones, but as you can see on the finished work, I changed this later into pink/magenta. The next step was to sketch the people in the background and then to give them depth by setting highlights and shadows – both in the same blue-greyish color palette. The finishing touches were the writings and the yellow glow around the skeletons.
Done with the painting, still angry – hope you too :-D
Read more about my art und upcoming exhibitions on neumannsalva or buy some of my digital artworks on NFT showroom.
Last but not least: if my post coaxed a smile on your face you could support me with cocain coffee on Ko-fi
