I decided to quickly sketch and paint of the same picture, to try and get an effect by creating quick lines and brush strokes to emphasize the shapes that build up the arm and body. It is far from being an accurate or to scale but that’s OK. I do not want my images to be an exact replica of the image i am drawing or painting. I want my emotion and my perspective to change the image through the process. Making the image my own. Making it unique to me. John Currin once said that its OK to draw badly. ” it’s just as easy to draw something good as you would badly, but the reason why i choose to draw things badly (not realistic) is because people aren’t convinced anymore by realistic impressions.” ( Cook, A. 2011, P.14)
Like my painting i have a particular style with the way that i draw and my source material. Although i like the idea of real life drawing, it is not easily accessible when creating works on the female nude. So like Jenny Saville and John Currin i have decided to create work from second hand source material as it is easy to access. I have taken a few images from the internet on muscular women (mainly body builders). The reason why i have chosen to create images from these very muscular women is that they are great examples of the over enlarged muscles that you would genuinely associate with men. But like Jenny Saville i have also researched body builders and the human bodies muscular system to get a better understanding of the sections that build up the muscles. For an example the stomach is made up of many muscles and sections that need to be worked out/ bulked up differently to build up one part of the body. Because of the male dominance surrounding the muscular form, it is not socially accepted for women to be as muscular as men. Women are generally perceived as the fairer sex. So would a muscular women be considered or not be considered as sexually appealing because they do not fit society’s idealized conception of what the female nude should look like?
From my research, and looking at the female nude, it got me thinking of the three Somatotypes :- Ectomorph (thin),Endomorph (round) and mesomorph (muscular).
The old masters usually painted in an idealized manner using social acceptance to push there nudes, these women where usually thin (ectomorph) to appeal and attract the audiences attention. Whereas Jenny Saville and Lucian Freud painted realistic women and even focused particularity at some point point on larger women ( endomorph), such as Savilles painting on Branded and Freuds paintings on Benifit supervisor. These women were not considered attractive they were obese with folds of skin that hung over more skin concealing the natural shape of the human body. There body pale with markings, blotches, sores and full of imperfection and irregularity.
So why is there few muscular women (mesomorph) in the public eye? Could this be due to society’s acceptance of the muscular shape, mainly being dominated by males. Evidence of this could be linked to many artists going back to Roman times when sculptures of men were depicted with large muscles to enforce the notion of their warriors and the power and strength. Renaissance carried this through too with Michelangelo and his sculpture of David.
But there is very little evidence of muscular women so this is something that i intend to look into more and create work from.
Being fascinated by the human body, is what led me to my subject for my dissertation. The dissertation ran along side my practical work. This interest for the human body and expression led me down the path of the creative minds of contemporary artists Lucian Freud, Jenny Saville, and John Currin, and allowed me to study intensively these three artists. I learned to appreciate the different viewpoints, and skills undertaken and the necessary progression, that had to be made for the female nude to once again, create an emotional connection between subject and viewer. Although these three artists have different viewpoint on there interpretation of the female nude, they all share a mutual appreciation of traditional paintings surrounding the portrayal of the nude (as do i), and have absorbed what has gone before in order for there work to evolve. The female nude is surrounded by social acceptance. Renaissance painters mainly portrayed there females in a idealized manner similar to Currin who paints his women to emphasizes there sexual attraction, compared to Freud and Saville who push the boundary of the female nude by painting un- idealized women.
