Throughout history, the social eye of the public has alway been centered on women, weather it be whom they marry, their actions, or their physical appearance. Artist, Janine Antoni diaplays her disagreement with this focus throughout her image titled “The Girl Made of Butter” (Brooklyn Museum). The title’s use of the word butter, an easily malleable object that possesses many forms and that is found frequently throughout society, introduces the idea of how the subject has been manipulated by society just as women have been for centuires. Please now direct your attention to the background of the photo towards the onlookers feet. Logically speaking, the subject, Jannie herslef, should posesse more power because she makes up more of the painting. …show more content…
Squeezing off the excess, she drapes her dye-soaked hair on the floor and slowly swings her head from side to side, leaving sweeping S-tracks distinctly reminiscent of giant expressionist brush strokes. As she methodically covers the floor... Is it mopping or painting? (Larson). Through using her hair instead of a brush and hair dye instead of paint Antoni specifically illustrates her rebellion against the sexulzation of women. This is done by creating a rebellious tone throughout her painting by not using the normal tools and through facing her back towards those who are following theses standards, the onlookers. Women’s hair has been a concern throughout society since 18th century (The History of Hair) and has transitioned from woman's head to leg hair. Antoni discards this concern by using long hair as her tool, expressing that she will no longer conform to this standard of hair restriction or of …show more content…
The correct answer is both, Antoni chooses to have the this style of painting resemble mopping, a task that has characteristically held by a woman. By Antoni displaying this action in black, a color usually associated with power and rebelliousness (Bourn Creative), reveals that Antoni believes women should once again break free of this social restriction. Antionis’s choice in using herself as the subject displays how personal the matter, of the treatment of women, is to the herself, therefore allowing you as the audience to relate not only to her, but also to understand how personal this matter should be to you.
Works Cited Page
Bourn, Jennifer. "Color Meaning: Meaning of The Color Black." Bourn Creative . Bourn Creative, LLC, 15 Dec. 2010. Web. 8 Apr. 2017. .
"Janine Antoni ." Brooklyn Museum . Ink Tree, n.d. Web. 9 Apr. 2017. .
Larson, Kay. "ART; Women’s Work (or Is It Art?) Is Never Done." The New York Times [New York] 1996: 1.
In the novel, Butter, by Erin Jade Lange, a 423-pound junior miserable with his current lifestyle creates a website, declaring a suicide by overeating live on New Year’s Eve. In this analysis the novel, Butter, the literary device of characterization is identified throughout Lange’s novel in addition to connecting to the theme of tolerance.
Subject: Our docent, Mary, shared with us that this artist loved to paint the human body and was well known for his painting of the human body and skin. This piece certainly highlights those skills. The colors of the hair and skin are incredibly life like.
The painting depicts a mother and her four children, who are all leaning on her as she looks down solemnly, her tired, despondent expression suggests she felt trapped in her roles as being a mother and a wife. The woman and her children are clearly the focal point of the artwork as the bright colours used to paint them stand out impeccably against the dull, lifeless colours of the background. This painting appears to be centred around the ideology that women are home-keepers, whose main role is to satisfy and assist her husband while simultaneously minding the children and keeping the home tidy and ready for his return. The social consequences of this artwork could have been that the woman could have been berated for not taking pleasure out of being a mother and raising her children, as a woman should. She could have been made redundant as her husband may have felt as though she is no longer useful if she couldn’t adequately adhere to her roles as a mother and a
The composition of this painting forces the eye to the woman, and specifically to her face. Although the white wedding dress is large and takes up most of the woman’s figure, the white contrasts with her face and dark hair, forcing the viewer to look more closely into the woman’s face. She smokes a cigarette and rests her chin on her hands. She does not appear to be a very young woman and her eyes are cast down and seem sad. In general, her face appears to show a sense of disillusionment with life and specifically with her own life. Although this is apparently her wedding day, she does not seem to be happy.
Prior to the 20th century, female artists were the minority members of the art world (Montfort). They lacked formal training and therefore were not taken seriously. If they did paint, it was generally assumed they had a relative who was a relatively well known male painter. Women usually worked with still lifes and miniatures which were the “lowest” in the hierarchy of genres, bible scenes, history, and mythological paintings being at the top (Montfort). To be able to paint the more respected genres, one had to have experience studying anatomy and drawing the male nude, both activities considered t...
A distinction of colors exists within the painting: there is dreary dark blue background contrasted by the intense shades of red and white worn by the figures. A specific example of this the women flanking the Virgin Mary. The woman to the right of Mary attracts the most light and is the brightest in color. The Virgin Mary herself is dark, dull, and shadowed. The woman behind Mary, similar to the other woman, is wearing red and bright. In reality, the lighting of these figures do not make logical sense. If Rosso’s mission was the depict reality than the women would be shaded evenly from light to dark. Due to the overall lack of a single swath of colors, the eye is forced to look all over the painting rather than focus on one main
Whitney Chadwick, Women, Art, and Society 3rd ed. (NY: Thames & Hudson world of art, 2002), 153-160.
In Manet’s painting Olympia the viewer is faced with two women, one white and one black. The black woman is hunched over and handing flowers to the white woman who looks to be of upper class origin but could also be lower class. This woman is reclined on a bed and propped up by some pillows with a black cat standing at the end of the bed looking at the viewer as well. She, like her cat, looks out at the viewer with indifference that both shocks and pulls in the viewer. While the black woman is dressed, the white woman is nude and wears only shoes, bracelets, a flower in her hair, and a ribbon necklace. The colors in this painting reflect the white woman’s personality as well, cold and unfeeling.
In this essay I’ll be exploring various concepts of women and will deeply criticise the way women are seen and portrayed through advertising. My primary resource I’ll be referring to throughout this essay is a book called ‘Ways of seeing’ by John Berger, which highlights the role women during the early renaissance and onwards. In addition to this I will explore the various beliefs of women from a wide range of secondary resources, and will include references from books, websites, and various images to help clarify my statements.
No other artist has ever made as extended or complex career of presenting herself to the camera as has Cindy Sherman. Yet, while all of her photographs are taken of Cindy Sherman, it is impossible to class call her works self-portraits. She has transformed and staged herself into as unnamed actresses in undefined B movies, make-believe television characters, pretend porn stars, undifferentiated young women in ambivalent emotional states, fashion mannequins, monsters form fairly tales and those which she has created, bodies with deformities, and numbers of grotesqueries. Her work as been praised and embraced by both feminist political groups and apolitical mainstream art. Essentially, Sherman’s photography is part of the culture and investigation of sexual and racial identity within the visual arts since the 1970’s. It has been said that, “The bulk of her work…has been constructed as a theater of femininity as it is formed and informed by mass culture…(her) pictures insist on the aporia of feminine identity tout court, represented in her pictures as a potentially limitless range of masquerades, roles, projections” (Sobieszek 229).
Alice Neel’s painting Suzanne Moss was created in 1962 using oil paint on canvas. As the title suggests, the painting depicts a woman’s portrait. Now resigning in the Chazen Museum in Madison, WI, this portrait of a woman lunging is notable for the emotional intensity it provokes as well as her expressionistic use of brush strokes and color. The scene is set by a woman, presumably Suzanne Moss, dressed in dull back and blues lounging across a seat, staring off to the side, avoiding eye contact with the viewer. The unique style and technique of portraiture captures the woman’s piercing gaze and alludes to the interior emotions of the subject. In Suzanne Moss, Alice Neel uses desultory brush strokes combined with contrast of warm and cool shadows
In the article “Beating Anorexia and Ganing Feminism,” Marni Grossman shares her experiance of how she overcame her struggle with anorexia through understanding the feminist movement. Marni objectafies the ways in which society’s expectations and ideas of what it means to have “beauty” is having and negitaive impact. I had a very similar experiance to Marni, in fact the first time I hated my apperance was in the seventh grade. I have olive skin and bold brows, features which i was often complamented on, yet hated. Shawn and Lee argue that “there is no fixed idea of beauty”, suggesting how social ideals from society differs depending on the culture (183). I remember A male student was bullying all the females in the class by Inscribing Gender
She captured herself in beautiful low-cut blue satin dress and the students in working dresses. The dress was painted in great detail and captured both the sheen and fluidity of satin. This was achieved by using shading and li...
The gestural and heavy working of the paint and the contrasting colors make the painting appear active yet are arduous to follow. The defining element of Woman and Bicycle is the presence of the black lines that do most of the work in terms of identifying the figure. Through the wild nature of the brushwork, color, and composition of the painting, it can be implied that the artist is making an implication towards the wild nature of even the most proper of women.
Rossetti shows us the woman being painted as many different things. Although she is just a painting, the woman symbolizes how the artist views women in real life: as objects. Irony is used when the woman is painted as “a queen”(5). She is put on a pedestal in a position of power, yet she is only described as being “in [an] opal or ruby dress”(5), cementing her role as an ornament. The ruby symbolizes passion and perhaps promiscuity. Opal is a white stone that reflects many colors. White symbolizes purity; while the different colors reflected symbolize how her meaning can change, and how the artist controls her identity and can make her fit any persona he desires. The woman is also depicted as a “nameless girl”(6), indicating her identity is not important to the artist. It also shows that he does not personally know the women he’s painting, but only their looks, affirming that he bases their value off of their appearances. Lastly, the artist portrays a woman as “a saint [and] an angel”(7) and compares her to the “moon”(11), an allusion to Artemis, the goddess of virginity. In this painting, she is established as a pure virgin, which was a requirement of the time period Rossetti lived in. However, because it is one of the fantasies the artist creates, and the poem antagonizes him, this line also expresses the idea that a woman’s purity should not define her. He makes the innocent virgin and the licentious queen the only ways women can be viewed. Yet, they are the same to him. Lacking depth, their physical description is the only thing giving them any meaning. Rossetti describing the portraits conveys the idea that no matter the position in society; or what their actual personalities are like, women are just blank canvases for men to project their fantasies onto. Uninterested in a real person, the artist worships the idea of a