I was going to post some videos of my process of creating my paintings Frank and Blue in the afternoon on Wednesday January, 6th, 2021. That morning I had CNN on the tv just to make sure the election was accepted by Congress. As I watched my fellow citizens try to stop my government from operating it made me angry. It doesn’t seem to matter how patient those of us whose candidate won were with the side that lost. They were willing to kill to get their way. Allowing them to exhaust all of their legal options didn’t satisfy them. Giving them leeway to express ridiculous claims, without evidence, didn’t satisfy them. Listening to them present personal opinions and fabrications didn’t satisfy them. As I watched these American citizens throw a dangerous temper-tantrum that killed people, I felt justified in my distaste for the months and months of catering to their absurd claims. The more ridiculous a claim is the more evidence is needed to present a case. But somehow these, mostly white, individuals presented wildly outrageous claims, without evidence, on a national stage. The attention they received fed their delusion which led to their insurrection and the deaths of people who would be alive today if they had not acted so violently. For me, it emphasized the need for retrospection.
After the events of January 6th began, it became clear posting my Frank and Blue videos that day was inappropriate. As the days passed and details of the insurrection were revealed I began to think more and more about the need to evaluate experiences. I decided to write a blog about the process of making these two paintings. It is critical to my progress as a person and as an artist to understand how I got where I am. I spend just as much time thinking backward as I do looking forward. It bothers a lot of people. I’ve been told it is destructive. I’ve been told it will hold me back from creating my best work. I’ve been told that it prevents me from building relationships. But I need to look back. I need to evaluate what led me here. I need to understand why I make the choices I do in order to make more productive choices going forward. I need to see where I struggled with my artwork to keep from stumbling over the same things over and over. This dichotomy is mirrored in the insurrection discourse between republicans and democrats. Republicans are claiming the past must be let go in order to move forward. While the democrats want to evaluate what happened and take action to prevent it from happening again. I side with the democrats.
These two subjects line up in my mind. As I think about posting my Frank and Blue progress videos I’m drawn to write about my process and progress to accompany the visuals. As I think about my process I think about what led to the insurrection. The distortion of facts, the misrepresentation of truth, the piecing together different views, and the need to find a better path are all found in both topics. I’m not the one to find a better path forward for America. I don’t have the expertise needed to navigate such a complicated journey. What I do know is that our way forward must be based in facts and educated research. Occasionally a person without facts and education will find a solution to a big problem but it is so rare that we cannot depend on it. People die while we wait to stumbled into solutions. People die when we move forward on false information. Our government should be preventing death, not causing it. Government must make decisions based in fact through people educated in the field of the topic. It seems ridiculous that such a thing needs to be said.
Frank and Blue
When painting, sometimes I take photos to study. I look at them to try to figure out if I like the direction I’m going or to try to figure out what I don’t like about a piece. It isolates the piece in my phone where I can flip it around and manipulate it and help me see it in different ways. The more I struggle with a piece, the more images I collect. I struggled with the pieces Frank and Blue which left me with a detailed collection of that struggle. I complied those images into two videos that show my struggle through the process of making these two paintings.
Frank
Frank is my first nude self-portrait. I created it because I was inspired to overcome my aversion to self-portraiture after discovering there were people who found my large body attractive. Their compliments built my confidence in my physical appearance. One person, who I met online, encouraged me to find myself; to find what I wanted. It was difficult for me. My children were grown but I struggled to break free from my commitment to raising my them. My marriage was failing but I struggled to see past my commitment as a wife. He encouraged me to do something without my family. I decided to do a glass fusing activity alone. Looking back I don’t know why it was so difficult. At the time I always checked with my husband and children to see if they wanted to join me before doing something. One of my children would have really enjoyed the activity and I still feel a little guilty about not inviting him. But the realization of how short of a leash my husband had on me was the wake-up call I needed. I purposely scheduled my glass fusion time during a time I knew he would be busy. It was kind of cheating to avoid the act of telling him he wasn’t invited. If I scheduled it when he was available I knew he would join me but not really enjoy the activity. I can still remember the stomach ache, produced by my first alone activity, over a year and a half ago. My husband didn’t scold me. He didn’t make any abusive accusations against me. All he did was wonder why I’d planned it when he couldn’t join me. The act of purposely doing something alone was a betrayal of our dynamic. I didn’t do things alone. He did but I didn't. It was odd that I was acting alone. It was odd that I made plans without consulting him. My anxiety over acting alone seems ridiculous now. Since then things have changed between us. I started going places without him. I quit letting him track my phone. I opened my own bank account. The biggest thing I did alone was spend a month in New York City. When I decide to make a change, I go big.
Most of my life I’ve avoided self-portraiture. I lacked the confidence in my body to look at it long enough to make an accurate representation. I’m normally a very good student and put my best effort into my artwork but I always half-assed self-portrait assignments. As my confidence in my body began to build, I was drawn to address this weakness in my studious nature. My online friends (especially the one who encouraged me to do things on my own) inspired me to look at myself -to find the beauty in my body. I had spent decades hiding behind baggy clothes and avoiding mirrors. I used bras to lift and restrict my large breasts. I used clothing to hide. I could not learn to appreciate my body if I could use clothing to change or hide parts of my body. I concluded the only way to truly face my body was to study my body without clothes.
As I sat in front of a mirror ready to start painting my first nude self-portrait, I felt naked. I was alone in my paint room. The door was locked. The room was dark except for the light I had positioned over myself. No one could see me or the marks I made with my brush but I still felt exposed. I felt on display, naked. I felt more vulnerable in that moment than I did sending nude images to strangers online. The nudity in the images I sent them was fixed. I chose what to share. I shared because I wanted to attract the gaze of men who are attracted to me. It built my confidence. Trying to paint myself was different. What I saw when I looked at myself in a mirror wavered; oscillating between flashes of contentment and a variety of dissatisfaction. When I tried to see myself through the eyes of the men that made me feel attractive, it felt false. I’m not attracted to my body. I cannot pretend to be. I wanted to find a loving relationship with myself. The act of painting my first self-portrait couldn’t be about presenting myself for others. It had to be about looking at myself through my bias and finding beauty in the way my curves and folds meet.
I was soon frustrated with my inability to paint my reflection. I am a terrible model. I’m fidgety and struggle to find my position. This struggle combined with the act of really looking at my body for the first time was too much. I decided to work from an image. I took a picture of myself in the mirror and used it as a source image. I soon realized I didn’t want my phone in the painting or my hand positioned over my body creating a shadow. I took a second picture with the other arm. I alternated between the two as source images to see each side of my body. They were taken from slightly different angles. I decided not to worry about it. I had no intention of sharing this painting. I focused on finding myself in my brushstrokes.
Soon my face became an issue. While taking the first two pictures I did not think about where I was looking or what expression I was making. I decided to add a third image, of my face, to my frankensteined source materials. Although I’ve struggled with my body, the struggle I’ve had with my face is a different issue. My body is consistently under attack. I’m confronted by complete strangers with dieting tips. A lot people assume I must want to lose weight. They assume I want to be thin and want their help to achieve their ideal for my body. I know accepting my body, as it is, defies the expectations of society. I do not feel that the way I perceive my body is distorted. My issues with how my body looks are directly related to how others have taught me to view the reality of my body. My struggle to accept my face is a different issue. There are times it seems foreign to me; distorted. In the past when I’ve tried to study my face for a self-portrait assignment, the parts move, enlarge or shrink. Sometimes I look in the mirror and it looks normal. At those times I see my mother’s face looking back at me. Other times it looks almost monstrous.
While painting Frank, using a fixed image helped stabilize the fluctuations in how I saw my face. On the bad days, I could turn the painting and the image upside down or sideways to paint, which removed my expectations of what my face should look like. It was no longer my face. It became shapes to replicate. Even using this technique, I still had to start over painting my face several times. Working through finding my face in paint has helped with the distortion. Since I finished the piece I have had fewer days that l look in the mirror and see a monster staring back. Painting Blue helped with that as well.
Blue
Blue is my second nude self-portrait. When I took the source image for Blue I was much better at taking pictures of myself. I learned to video myself and take screenshots of the video to create still images. I could try several poses in one video and use the one I liked best. This painting was created during a difficult period in my life. My husband and I sold the house we’d lived in with our children for almost 15 years. We moved into the house right after our youngest child turned 4. The house went under contract immediately after we put in on the market, which surprised us. But then the buyer lost their financing 5 days before closing. We had a near empty house to put back on the market. It was quickly under contract again but I decided to live in the house alone while we waited a month to close. The second buyers were difficult and I did not think we would get to closing the second time either. While living in the near empty house I took my time and fixed a few things around the house. I also kept a few painting supplies and a canvas to work on my second nude self-portrait. I had bought a discount tube of blue paint and decided to play with it. The combination of leaving my home of 15 years, selling it to people I didn’t like, and painting in blue seemed appropriate. I was sad and angry. Getting lost in Blue was what I needed.
My pose in Blue is a presentation of my body to be gazed upon by those who appreciate my curves. But it is also a struggle to move forward. I anchored the piece with heavy strokes in the hands that hold down my rough horizontal legs and immobile feet because I felt unable to move forward. As I painted the curves of my breasts and belly I felt calm and attractive. But as I painted the hands, legs and feet I felt stubborn and lacked concern for the soothing appeal of calming curves. The two felt right together. I don’t like the horizontal stripes on the legs but I felt they were appropriate to create. I could not change them. I could not smooth them. As I layered chunks of paint on my hands I felt like I was pushing them down; helping to keep my knees from moving. When I look at this piece now I feel defiant and calm.
Like Frank, I also struggled with the face of Blue. While living in my empty house I could not get my face to form. It was easier to deal with the frustration the second time. I accepted that it would be a more difficult portion to paint from the beginning. I worked on the parts that I enjoyed more. We did close on the house the second time. Blue was not finished when I finished moving out of the house. It sat in a closet for 2 months in our rental house. When I started working on it again the face quickly took shape. It felt like I had made the right life choices as I found my face in the piece.
While writing about my struggles with Frank and Blue I keep thinking about the fractures in America. The disjointed agendas that rip this country apart seem impossible to fix. I think about the progress I’ve made and the fact that my progress required me to let go of other people’s destructive agendas. I am never going to be the socially accepted picture of beauty. I can only be me. Just being me is difficult enough. Just trying to find a way to move forward as myself without dragging other people’s baggage along with me is enough of a struggle. If we could stop making life harder for each other maybe it won’t take the frustration of decades of avoidance to live better lives. If we could set up opportunities for people to find what they need to build their version of better lives we’d stop trying to tear each other down. Wishing others dead or trying to kill them is unacceptable. Dead people can’t build better lives. Those who want to harm others are the outliers -albeit loud ones. We cannot let them control our direction. Americans can build a country that offers opportunities for growth for all people. But we have to choose it. I hope we do.
Addition on February 17, 2021
When I originally made this post on February 2nd I knew it was clunky. My thoughts were clunky. They still are. Since then, the second impeachment of a president who obviously inspired an insurrection ended with without conviction. It wasn't pointless. Even some of the senators who voted against conviction admitted he was guilty. They leaned on it being unconstitutional to impeach a former president -even though the senate already decided it was constitutional.
The trial was very important. It was what I needed to see. The evidence presented reviewed what led to the insurrection. It showed the obvious connection between the repetition of lies and praise of violence which stoked the violence in the crowd. I had already put the pieces together. I've been listening to the president praise violence since his first campaign. So many people wrote it off as typical campaign hyperbole, that it was frightening. People, that I didn't know had violent thoughts towards those with opposing views, would laugh off the violence. They enjoyed it. Others would just ignore it and focus on what they thought were worthy policy benefits. If violence was the cost, so be it. It was obvious to me that greater and greater violence was going to happen. Violence is easily inspired but difficult to settle down. Using violence to motivate is lazy and requires little intelligence. Assembling the review of what led to the insurrection required great patience and intelligence. Sometimes I get impatient with the political progress on the left. Okay, all the time. But after watching the trial, I can see the benefit of their patience. They presented a clear case because the evidence was clear. There is no doubt who the insurrectionists represented and who inspired them. They documented it themselves. My vision of greater and greater violence could not be a basis for action. Preemptive punishment is never justified. The only person who could have prevented the insurrection was the president. Security could have been better and stopped the crowd faster but prevention lays solely at the president's feet. He inspired it. Only he could have chosen not to provide the inspiration.
While writing about Frank and Blue I could not help but intertwine my thoughts with the political climate. The struggle I felt while painting myself feels similar to the struggle between the slow progress of compromising political moderates and the violence of maintaining white male power. As I work to accept and understand my image, thoughts of what traditional society has taught me about my body cuts into mind. Acceptance and understanding are slow and require compromise. Thoughts of established ugliness are brutal and uncompromising -they demand to be all consuming without any evidence of their right to dominance. Watching the impeachment trial, as the evidence was clearly laid out for America, gave me confidence in my ability to accept and understand my body. It will take time. I must be patient. It cannot matter if 43% of the jury refuse to watch or accept the evidence because of a false narrative. Being made to feel ugly is wrong.
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