A pregnant friend sat for this portrait and it’s one of my favorite pieces. What I love about it is that the design came together almost immediately. The circular drape that frames her figure, the hot red-pink of the chair meeting her eye level, the “arrow” of the bra pointing at her belly. It really works. It was also a painting that was completed fairly quickly. There’s no drawing to share because it was designed in situ, right on the canvas.
Given all of the recent talk about gender and specifically the Trans community, I thought it might be a good opportunity to discuss this piece.
In my early grad school time at MICA, I was exploring the question of “gaydar” and whether someone could be recognizably LGBT. Was that a quality that could be painted or shown in a portrait if the sitter was pregnant? Pregnancy is generally considered a marker of being hetero; would my sitter, who is an “average” lesbian, be recognized as such?
I made a handful of portraits for the Marked series, including one of a transgender friend who very bravely sat nude for me for hours while I painted her and we talked.
What I learned mostly is that gender is much more than just how a person looks. Judith Butler’s work, Gender Trouble, explains that we learn gender by watching and interpreting another person’s (or group’s) behavior and adopting certain aspects of a gesture, posture, a stance, a way of speech, clothing, etc. What that means is— as many people as there are, there are that many different “takes” on gender. And who one is attracted to is only one part of gender.
My own take on gender was never really very feminine. I preferred being a tomboy and hanging out with my brothers and their friends. Femininity seemed elusive, confusing, and perhaps it seems that way to a lot of women. There are many behaviors to observe and many of them seem to be in conflict. Many come from past but now-useless rituals or rites of passage. And many are downright harmful.
We humans are far more “fluid” than we realize. I like the variety—being able to muscle my way through a building construction project during the day and later in the evening clean up with heels and makeup for an event. There’s never one way to be “feminine” or “masculine” so we should just muddle through it and find what feels right to our being. The good thing is that today there seem to be many more options for everyone to be themselves.
So, go be yourself, you lovely human.