Before I get into the art I've created more recently, I want to take a step back and discuss a little about my senior honor's thesis, which I wrote for my BFA in 2010. This thesis is what I am still best known for today, and is available on EMU's website for free.
Not long ago, I googled my name (both in its current form, and under my maiden name, Andrea Frownfelter, which I was still using when that thesis was finished), and was pleasantly surprised to find that my thesis is currently being used as a citation on the Wikipedia page for "Flower" (look under the subheading "Symbolism"), and that it was referenced in a Prezi presentation for someone's final project about Dracula and in a July 2014 blog post by cavalcadeofcookies. I was also recently contacted by Eureka, a television production company based in Montreal, because they had read my thesis and wanted to interview me for an upcoming series on sexuality/sensuality in contemporary art.
This thesis is definitely the most politically/socially charged work I've done to date, as well as the most cohesive series I've created. There were 11 large watercolor paintings in the series (ranging in size from 20"x22" to 22"x30"). All are still available for sale (although I currently have "Pinned for Safety" and "Stabbed" hanging in my dining room, and am a little more reluctant to part with those two).
And the thesis all started with this painting, which I named Feminine Layers. (Available for purchase through my Etsy shop.)
I had taken a few watercolor studio classes at Eastern and had found that I was particularly fond of painting flowers - something about the organic shapes just appealed to me more than any other subject matter. I was also, at this time, taking graphic design courses for my second art concentration, and so was playing around a lot with Photoshop and Illustrator, creating my own patterns and designs. In this painting I decided to combine the two, layering patterns onto the petals of a rose, with the effect that the rose was "flattened" into a more abstract design. Other than experimentation and a desire to merge the two disciplines I was studying, I also leaned toward this less realistic style because I did not have confidence in my ability to pull off something that was hyper-realistic. I still considered myself a watercolor novice and I saw other women in class who were so talented in realism that I did not think my own watercolor skills would ever compare.
I say "women," by the way, because there were only a dozen or so of us pursuing watercolor as a concentration (either at the bachelor's or master's level), and we were all women, with only one exception - and his focus was on using watercolor to illustrate comic books, not to create large-scale realistic (or semi-realistic) paintings. This gender distribution was a stark contrast to the near 50-50 gender split in my graphic design classes, and to my life drawing classes (drawing from nude models), which were also close to 50-50 but slightly skewed toward more male students in each class. Let me drive home this point further, because I think it's so interesting - there were more male students in the Jewelry making studio I took as an elective one semester than there were in any watercolor class I took. My guess is that, even though women are the bulk wearers of jewelry, working and shaping metal was seen as a more "manly" art than painting watercolors - and that, subconsciously or not, this "gender bias" influenced which artistic fields the male art students gravitated toward.
Watercolor is seen as feminine, as dainty, as soft - even as relaxing. I have told people that I paint watercolors and heard wistful sighs because they, too, would love to spend all day just painting watercolors - "It must be so relaxing!" No. It's not. Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but watercolor is not relaxing to me. It's in fact fraught with worry, because once the paper is wet, I have only so many minutes to play around with the pigment before it starts to dry. The speed at which it dries depends on the temperature and humidity of the space, and can vary from one day to the next in the basement studio in which I work. (It's not that great a space, I guess.) And, unlike acrylic paint, I can't lighten a watercolor later by adding white paint on top again. Watercolors are translucent, which means that every layer you add still shows a little of the layer underneath it. So with every subsequent layer, the colors will only get darker. If you need a light color - a white, a pale yellow, a pale pink - you need to preserve those areas ahead of time, because once you start painting you can never go back. It's like writing something and not being able to use Ctrl-Z, not being able to backspace. It's a little terrifying, to be honest. Once you put water down, you're sealing everything underneath it. It can't be easily changed back. This is where I get anxious, where I struggle to finish a painting - because if it starts to look good, I worry that subsequent layers are going to just mess it up, that maybe it would be better to leave it as is, when it still shows promise.
Watercolor requires a lot of forethought, a lot of planning, and a lot of patience. After one layer is down, I have to walk away from it until it dries completely before I can move on to the next layer. It requires a lot of control. I don't know if that is an argument for why it is seen as stereotypically feminine - because "boys will be boys," they can't be tamed, they can't be expected to have that kind of quiet patience - or if that's an argument for why it shouldn't be seen as stereotypically feminine - because it's an intellectual art, requiring premeditation and dexterity. Maybe it's simply an argument for why categorizing fields of art (or any profession for that matter) into "feminine" and "masculine" areas is stupid, and why the words "feminine" and "masculine" are stupid words that only have meaning if we continue to give them meaning, words our society should've "gotten past" by now, if the sexes were truly equal. Why can't boys be quiet and patient? Why can't girls be cerebral and skilled?
But I'm getting off track.
When I started this painting, I wasn't necessarily thinking of flowers as symbols for female genitalia; I chose flowers and I chose patterns for aesthetic reasons. But as I painted, and as I started thinking about what drew me to that aesthetic choice, and as I heard what others in my class were saying about the painting during critique, I realized that I could create a pretty powerful message (or, rather, pretty powerful messages - because I don't believe any art can be or should be interpreted in only one way, even if the artist had one specific way in mind) if I used that well-known symbolism to guide a viewer's interpretation in a certain direction.
And so my thesis was born. I read about Judy Chicago and her paintings and drawings and sculptures of vulva-shaped flowers and butterflies, and I adjusted my painting to emphasize the center of the rose. As I said in my thesis:
"The most abstracted part of the flower is also the watercolor’s emphasis – a dark organic shape in the top right of the painting, which is meant to act as the core of the flower, from which the petals radiate. At the time that I created this piece, I was still in the beginning stages of researching flower symbolism; one artist whom I had already stumbled across, however, was Judy Chicago. I was immediately drawn to Chicago’s so-called “cunt imagery,” that is, paintings with brightly-colored, centralized, symmetrical designs radiating from a center. Though Chicago’s imagery resonated with me, it evoked a feeling I only aspired to, rather than one I had actually felt. With Chicago’s imagery and also my own worries in mind, I created this dark abstract flower center, to symbolize the mystery and shame that many women associate with their vaginas. As Eve Ensler so aptly puts it in her play The Vagina Monologues, “There’s so much darkness and secrecy surrounding them – like the Bermuda Triangle. Nobody ever reports back from there. In the first place, it’s not easy even to find your vagina. Women go weeks, months, sometimes years without looking at it.”"
You may be wondering what I meant by "my own worries." This blog entry is already getting lengthy, so for now I will leave it at this - I painted this watercolor when I was 20 years old. I had only had one boyfriend (and still have only had one relationship, for that boyfriend became the man I married), and had very little sexual experience. I was - and often still am - ashamed and mystified by my own body and by the idea of sex. I did not know how to talk about it or what to think about it. I understood that it would be great, would be liberating, to have positive feelings about my body and about sex, but I was not there yet (and would argue that I am still not there today, six years later).
In any case, I paired that dark, mysterious rose center with decorative petals in lighter colors and fanciful patterns. Maybe I was thinking about how I wanted to feel, or about how other women might feel (Judy Chicago, for instance, who I imagine would be skeptical or disappointed or disgusted or exasperated that a 20-year-old, a 26-year-old today might feel more inhibited, more restrained, more embarrassed, than she ever had about herself decades earlier). Maybe I just liked the way they looked, liked the contrast between the dark colors and the light colors.
In my thesis, I wrote that the patterns referenced domestic life - upholstery, wallpaper, tablecloths - and therefore a stereotypical feminine aesthetic. I exhorted myself for this, asking how I could "admonish feminine stereotypes if I'm so willing to work within them myself". Six years later, I still have no real answer for this. I still find myself absorbed in delicate patterns. I still want to paint them, to draw them, to pair them with other feminine stereotypes - flowers and teacups and fabric. I wish I didn't; I wish my tastes gravitated instead toward more neutral or masculine subjects, so that when I say women should not be asked to fit a certain mold, I can demonstrate how that would look, a woman who paints what a man might paint. I do not know if my tastes are intrinsic, or if I've developed them because of what I've been taught to prefer. It is the age-old nature vs. nurture debate. I don't know if I should fight these tastes, strive to develop new tastes, or if I should accept where I am now, who I am now, what I'm drawn to - as part of the female sex, a sex that is far more varied than feminine stereotypes would lead us to believe.
Once I recognized that flowers could be symbols for sexuality, for sexual organs, for flesh; once I continued painting watercolors with this idea in mind, I couldn't help but reinterpret this painting, my first in this thesis series, again. If the petals are skin, then the patterns painted on the petals would be tattoos, a way of branding one's own body, a mode of self-expression. As I said in my thesis, "Tattoos on a rose... would then speak to defining a woman’s individual sexuality." I wanted those tattoos, I wanted that self-expression, but I felt that I didn't deserve it, or hadn't earned it, or shouldn't exert it. I avoid displaying confidence in most things, my sexuality included. For some women, I know, it is easy to get past society's prevailing attitudes. For others, for me, it's been unbelievably hard, an ongoing struggle. In an ideal world, women would feel comfortable expressing their own opinions, of being their own sexual beings - but we do not live in an ideal world. In my thesis, I ask if a woman can get past our country's, our religion's, our culture's history of embarrassment and shame with regards to female sexuality, any sexuality. I ask if society's attitude is too pervasive to overcome.
My answer to that question depends on my level of optimism.
Don't forget - this painting is available for purchase through my Etsy shop!
Not long ago, I googled my name (both in its current form, and under my maiden name, Andrea Frownfelter, which I was still using when that thesis was finished), and was pleasantly surprised to find that my thesis is currently being used as a citation on the Wikipedia page for "Flower" (look under the subheading "Symbolism"), and that it was referenced in a Prezi presentation for someone's final project about Dracula and in a July 2014 blog post by cavalcadeofcookies. I was also recently contacted by Eureka, a television production company based in Montreal, because they had read my thesis and wanted to interview me for an upcoming series on sexuality/sensuality in contemporary art.
This thesis is definitely the most politically/socially charged work I've done to date, as well as the most cohesive series I've created. There were 11 large watercolor paintings in the series (ranging in size from 20"x22" to 22"x30"). All are still available for sale (although I currently have "Pinned for Safety" and "Stabbed" hanging in my dining room, and am a little more reluctant to part with those two).
And the thesis all started with this painting, which I named Feminine Layers. (Available for purchase through my Etsy shop.)
 |
| "Feminine Layers" by Andrea Arbit - Watercolor painting on paper, 20"x22" |
I had taken a few watercolor studio classes at Eastern and had found that I was particularly fond of painting flowers - something about the organic shapes just appealed to me more than any other subject matter. I was also, at this time, taking graphic design courses for my second art concentration, and so was playing around a lot with Photoshop and Illustrator, creating my own patterns and designs. In this painting I decided to combine the two, layering patterns onto the petals of a rose, with the effect that the rose was "flattened" into a more abstract design. Other than experimentation and a desire to merge the two disciplines I was studying, I also leaned toward this less realistic style because I did not have confidence in my ability to pull off something that was hyper-realistic. I still considered myself a watercolor novice and I saw other women in class who were so talented in realism that I did not think my own watercolor skills would ever compare.
I say "women," by the way, because there were only a dozen or so of us pursuing watercolor as a concentration (either at the bachelor's or master's level), and we were all women, with only one exception - and his focus was on using watercolor to illustrate comic books, not to create large-scale realistic (or semi-realistic) paintings. This gender distribution was a stark contrast to the near 50-50 gender split in my graphic design classes, and to my life drawing classes (drawing from nude models), which were also close to 50-50 but slightly skewed toward more male students in each class. Let me drive home this point further, because I think it's so interesting - there were more male students in the Jewelry making studio I took as an elective one semester than there were in any watercolor class I took. My guess is that, even though women are the bulk wearers of jewelry, working and shaping metal was seen as a more "manly" art than painting watercolors - and that, subconsciously or not, this "gender bias" influenced which artistic fields the male art students gravitated toward.
Watercolor is seen as feminine, as dainty, as soft - even as relaxing. I have told people that I paint watercolors and heard wistful sighs because they, too, would love to spend all day just painting watercolors - "It must be so relaxing!" No. It's not. Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but watercolor is not relaxing to me. It's in fact fraught with worry, because once the paper is wet, I have only so many minutes to play around with the pigment before it starts to dry. The speed at which it dries depends on the temperature and humidity of the space, and can vary from one day to the next in the basement studio in which I work. (It's not that great a space, I guess.) And, unlike acrylic paint, I can't lighten a watercolor later by adding white paint on top again. Watercolors are translucent, which means that every layer you add still shows a little of the layer underneath it. So with every subsequent layer, the colors will only get darker. If you need a light color - a white, a pale yellow, a pale pink - you need to preserve those areas ahead of time, because once you start painting you can never go back. It's like writing something and not being able to use Ctrl-Z, not being able to backspace. It's a little terrifying, to be honest. Once you put water down, you're sealing everything underneath it. It can't be easily changed back. This is where I get anxious, where I struggle to finish a painting - because if it starts to look good, I worry that subsequent layers are going to just mess it up, that maybe it would be better to leave it as is, when it still shows promise.
Watercolor requires a lot of forethought, a lot of planning, and a lot of patience. After one layer is down, I have to walk away from it until it dries completely before I can move on to the next layer. It requires a lot of control. I don't know if that is an argument for why it is seen as stereotypically feminine - because "boys will be boys," they can't be tamed, they can't be expected to have that kind of quiet patience - or if that's an argument for why it shouldn't be seen as stereotypically feminine - because it's an intellectual art, requiring premeditation and dexterity. Maybe it's simply an argument for why categorizing fields of art (or any profession for that matter) into "feminine" and "masculine" areas is stupid, and why the words "feminine" and "masculine" are stupid words that only have meaning if we continue to give them meaning, words our society should've "gotten past" by now, if the sexes were truly equal. Why can't boys be quiet and patient? Why can't girls be cerebral and skilled?
But I'm getting off track.
When I started this painting, I wasn't necessarily thinking of flowers as symbols for female genitalia; I chose flowers and I chose patterns for aesthetic reasons. But as I painted, and as I started thinking about what drew me to that aesthetic choice, and as I heard what others in my class were saying about the painting during critique, I realized that I could create a pretty powerful message (or, rather, pretty powerful messages - because I don't believe any art can be or should be interpreted in only one way, even if the artist had one specific way in mind) if I used that well-known symbolism to guide a viewer's interpretation in a certain direction.
And so my thesis was born. I read about Judy Chicago and her paintings and drawings and sculptures of vulva-shaped flowers and butterflies, and I adjusted my painting to emphasize the center of the rose. As I said in my thesis:
"The most abstracted part of the flower is also the watercolor’s emphasis – a dark organic shape in the top right of the painting, which is meant to act as the core of the flower, from which the petals radiate. At the time that I created this piece, I was still in the beginning stages of researching flower symbolism; one artist whom I had already stumbled across, however, was Judy Chicago. I was immediately drawn to Chicago’s so-called “cunt imagery,” that is, paintings with brightly-colored, centralized, symmetrical designs radiating from a center. Though Chicago’s imagery resonated with me, it evoked a feeling I only aspired to, rather than one I had actually felt. With Chicago’s imagery and also my own worries in mind, I created this dark abstract flower center, to symbolize the mystery and shame that many women associate with their vaginas. As Eve Ensler so aptly puts it in her play The Vagina Monologues, “There’s so much darkness and secrecy surrounding them – like the Bermuda Triangle. Nobody ever reports back from there. In the first place, it’s not easy even to find your vagina. Women go weeks, months, sometimes years without looking at it.”"
You may be wondering what I meant by "my own worries." This blog entry is already getting lengthy, so for now I will leave it at this - I painted this watercolor when I was 20 years old. I had only had one boyfriend (and still have only had one relationship, for that boyfriend became the man I married), and had very little sexual experience. I was - and often still am - ashamed and mystified by my own body and by the idea of sex. I did not know how to talk about it or what to think about it. I understood that it would be great, would be liberating, to have positive feelings about my body and about sex, but I was not there yet (and would argue that I am still not there today, six years later).
In any case, I paired that dark, mysterious rose center with decorative petals in lighter colors and fanciful patterns. Maybe I was thinking about how I wanted to feel, or about how other women might feel (Judy Chicago, for instance, who I imagine would be skeptical or disappointed or disgusted or exasperated that a 20-year-old, a 26-year-old today might feel more inhibited, more restrained, more embarrassed, than she ever had about herself decades earlier). Maybe I just liked the way they looked, liked the contrast between the dark colors and the light colors.
In my thesis, I wrote that the patterns referenced domestic life - upholstery, wallpaper, tablecloths - and therefore a stereotypical feminine aesthetic. I exhorted myself for this, asking how I could "admonish feminine stereotypes if I'm so willing to work within them myself". Six years later, I still have no real answer for this. I still find myself absorbed in delicate patterns. I still want to paint them, to draw them, to pair them with other feminine stereotypes - flowers and teacups and fabric. I wish I didn't; I wish my tastes gravitated instead toward more neutral or masculine subjects, so that when I say women should not be asked to fit a certain mold, I can demonstrate how that would look, a woman who paints what a man might paint. I do not know if my tastes are intrinsic, or if I've developed them because of what I've been taught to prefer. It is the age-old nature vs. nurture debate. I don't know if I should fight these tastes, strive to develop new tastes, or if I should accept where I am now, who I am now, what I'm drawn to - as part of the female sex, a sex that is far more varied than feminine stereotypes would lead us to believe.
Once I recognized that flowers could be symbols for sexuality, for sexual organs, for flesh; once I continued painting watercolors with this idea in mind, I couldn't help but reinterpret this painting, my first in this thesis series, again. If the petals are skin, then the patterns painted on the petals would be tattoos, a way of branding one's own body, a mode of self-expression. As I said in my thesis, "Tattoos on a rose... would then speak to defining a woman’s individual sexuality." I wanted those tattoos, I wanted that self-expression, but I felt that I didn't deserve it, or hadn't earned it, or shouldn't exert it. I avoid displaying confidence in most things, my sexuality included. For some women, I know, it is easy to get past society's prevailing attitudes. For others, for me, it's been unbelievably hard, an ongoing struggle. In an ideal world, women would feel comfortable expressing their own opinions, of being their own sexual beings - but we do not live in an ideal world. In my thesis, I ask if a woman can get past our country's, our religion's, our culture's history of embarrassment and shame with regards to female sexuality, any sexuality. I ask if society's attitude is too pervasive to overcome.
My answer to that question depends on my level of optimism.
Don't forget - this painting is available for purchase through my Etsy shop!
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