Response to Lisa Yuskavage

This week I looked up Lisa Yuskavage. This artist works in oil on linen, making highly sexualized female nudes. The figures she paints are highly artistic and are exaggerated usually in a sexually appealing way. The artist's use of color is unrealistic and stands out from other figures. The most apparent part of these paintings though is the confrontational sexuality that is portrayed. According to various art dealers, museums and articles, some consider the work to be no more than kitschy soft-porn, while others see the work as strong feminism. I don't really care which is the artists intention, and am rather annoyed about the way I saw this theory discussed. I cannot attribute confrontational sexuality in a female nude as feminist. The theory of that seems to rely on a double standard of voyeurism. This is a matter of female portrayal in media and no one seems to know if it is helpful or hurtful to the equal rights of women. I can't give that argument too much credit as it seems that people are more interested in making the artist more politically involved than she appears to be. In this article, they say that Lisa said the work was a personal exploration of what she hated, and her sexuality. I'll give that more credit. If a person has an opinion or a context in which they see a piece, that's perfectly fine, but it seems in this case that the noise of what people want to see in her work is overpowering the work itself. I could only find the work itself in the context of sales as well. It is being marketed this way, and though I'm glad the artist is successful, I don't like seeing this much commerce based on vogue popularity and blind speculation. The art itself has merit. It is skillfully crafted and both confronts and entices the viewer. The audience of artists critiquing it just cannot seem to make up their minds.

Response to Tim Gardner

It seems I'm falling a bit behind on these. I can't make any excuses so I'll just have to do more than one a week for a little while. This probably isn't the best news after that, but the semester is wearing me out a bit particularly in the life drawing aspect. Not that Life Drawing II is too much, but it seems like most of my classes have become surrogate life drawing classes. I've filled up close to five sketchbooks with life drawings but haven't had time for any really fun, personal drawings. With this craving for creativity and imagination, I'm afraid I didn't enjoy the artist I'm responding to too much this week. Tim Gardner is a watercolor painter. While his works are technically sound, I find them to be a tad stiff. It was hard to determine which paintings I was supposed to be looking at. Apparently there is more than one artistic Tim Gardner. The paintings I found to be most interesting are the ones where one or two figures stand alone in a space. There is often some scenic vista that fills the canvas. Though I can see the scene made larger by the small figure, I didn't really get any emotional reaction. This is probably just on my end, but as I said the figures looked a bit stiff and bland. Nothing really stood out as unique or especially engaging. On another day I might give a bit more credit but I just didn't really get exited about Gardner's work.