The last post was really a preamble for a recent observation I made about the Pink Lady composition. (the above is the sketch for a larger painting I am currently working on)

I have managed, recently, to work without the suffocating influence of preconceived art historical/theoretical references. My descision making process has attempted to be more instinctive, from both iconographic to painterly choices.

What is interesting is when these choices, in hidsight, seem to play with the kind of art historical references which I had chosen to block out.

The following could all well be a splurge of pretentious and projected nonsense. Yet I am happier that it came from the process rather than guided the process. That seems a slightly more hoenst approach.

As my last post proposed art history has traditionally assinged certain gender role to particular figural dynamics. The male being the assertive, errect, active, heroic form. The female the horizontal, submissive, erotic receiver of the gaze.

In ‘The Pink Lady’ I was surprised to see how totally I seem to have inverted this, without any conscious reference.

Here the female is vertical. She is the powerful protagonist. Her sexuality seems not to be the subject of the male gaze the the cause of his fall. She is a statue but the controller of the mini narratives which surround her. Umoving and solid she is matryachal.

 The male figure is horizontal. He is either faller or lying on the floor as the result of a decline. He is the victim of the females sexuality, the product of a tragic certainty. He has no control and is defined by that which surrounds him.

I don’t want to go too much further than this, because I feel these observations are, in the main, accurate. To attempt to justify, explain or find out why would be to move onto the pretentions of sociological or philosophical analysis.

 I certainly know, and it worries me. That this dillema resonates with highly personal psychological realities. It could also be argued that it has wider reverberations with certain gender power plays in life. But to go down that road is to risk making vague generalisations. All I know is that for the first time in a long time an aspect of my work disturbs me.