"gentlemen's paintings" blog

This blog is dedicated to my photography project called Gentlemen's Paintings. It will include all the voices by the people participating in the project. Let's see where it goes!

see: http://gentlemenspaintings.tumblr.com/

About Gentlemen's Paintings:

This work-in-progress, titled Gentlemen’s Paintings, is about self-expression; it is simultaneously a comment on societal attitudes about the “appropriateness” of middle-aged women according to contemporary societal standards. Women, in their 40s and 50s, face the complicated transition between youth and old age and many struggle to define their public persona and image. Gentlemen’s Paintings is a photographic reflection of this struggle unbound by societal norms.

‘Gentlemen’s Paintings,’ is also a personal project about my uncomfortable relationship to Southern California’s societal environment where attaining youthful beauty at all cost is considered an important achievement. As a middle-aged, east coast, ex-urbanite woman, the process of attempting to assimilate into this new arena has been a challenge and has challenged my notions of what it means to “age gracefully.”

In the 18th century, Francisco Goya painted a series of portraits of society women called “Gentlemen’s Paintings,” which serves as the inspiration for this project. Not only did he paint provocative portraits (presumably for an audience of male patrons), he also painted portraits of aristocratic women in bucolic settings who faithfully embraced their current mores -- at least by their outward appearance. My project is a modern take on Goya’s work, where I depict women who are able to take many more liberties. I use the context of San Diego’s paradisiacal landscapes to further draw a connection to Goya’s work and thereby create a juxtaposition to my urban past.

‘Gentlemen’s Paintings’ is an apt title for my project because an important component of my work is about “audience.” Goya painted his Gentlemen’s Paintings series for a particular audience. In my own series of photographic images, instead of making these images for a targeted demographic, the subjects themselves beg the question about “audience.” For this project, I ask the models to choose clothing that best expresses their personality, but something that they would wear on any given day. I want to know: For whom do these women dress? What aspects of their personalities led them to choose the way they express themselves?
In this project, I am also interested in the relationship between painting and photography. These images are fully inspired by the medium of painting. “Realism [in painting] doesn’t require verisimilitude but only just enough visual cues to exploit the mind’s credulity.” (1) In this case, photography is very similar to painting, not because we view a photograph as an irrefutable statement of reality but because we regard the medium as a malleable tool in the service of the imagination.

These forty, 24x30 images will be digitally printed with archival inks on fugi-flex paper and will be presented in aluminum frames flush with the image surface. They are all shot with a Canon 5D Mark II.

My plan is to exhibit this body of work. Accompanying every image, will be an interview with each participant about their views on aging and self-expression. These interviews will be posted on the Gentlemen’s Paintings blog in text and HD video format. When exhibiting these 40 images, I would also like to loop the interviews on at least two TV monitors, and include excerpts of the interviews in text format to hang by each portrait.

I am indebted to Ryan Skinner, for his lighting expertise and labor on this project. Thank you to all the great women for participating in my project, especially Lisa Orr -- who gave me the courage to embark on this project.

(1) Peter Schjeldahl, Onward and Upward with the Arts, “The Flip Side,” The New Yorker, November 29, 2010, p. 42