A new strand to Joy Development: on the last Friday of the month I intend to share my observations from working in the studio.
Over April I’ve found my bearings in relation to a new series of watercoloured drawings. The series became realised when I settled on a title. I’d been journaling possibilities, getting stuck on the words zeitgeist and haunted, both conjuring up something important but not specific to this story I wanted to tell. I had to unpack these words and really identify what I wanted this series to do. Eventually, on walk, the title clarified itself: Spirit of a Muse.
The impetus for this series is an image I found on the internet years ago (2017 I think). It’s a publicity still from the film Broadway (1929). I’ve been able to source the film and watch it. In the photo, Merna Kennedy in character as a nightclub chorus girl looks up at a shiny black sculpture. My supposition is that this sculpture was made by Alexander Archipenko, a Ukrainian sculptor who moved to the US in the 20s. The mutual gaze and pose mirroring of Kennedy and the sculpture are fascinating to me. There’s something mutual that is communicated between them, something too that is communicated to a viewer by them both. Perhaps they are both embodiments of ‘the new woman’, the savvy, fashionable worker of the early 20th century.
Obviously, I had to source my own version of Kennedy’s outfit. I got a leotard made, found shoes and a wig that enabled me to be another chorus girl from the film. In 2022 I styled myself accordingly and a friend photographed me mimicking dozens of pin-up poses from the 30s. I did a few yoga poses and also relaxed, seated, off-duty. I thought about the poses of Henry Moore’s reclining figures.
My original intention, and ultimately, stumbling block, was that I wanted to pair watercolours I made from the photos with sketches that imagine sculptures in the same pose. A couple do have them and I think I could develop those sketches separately as be part of the series. For now, though, I realised I needed to get on and make these images from the photographs.
In truth, I’m not the best draughtsman. I’m not very good at faces. For now, it’s only my own face I mess up, but I have another series I’m experimenting with that does involve other people’s faces. Rather foolishly I leave the face til last then can ruin the whole thing with a terrible face. I have on occasion disposed of the worst offenders. But the thing is this: I am against perfectionism. I consider perfectionism ungenerous self-absorption and self-aggrandisement. I may also be taking this too far but perfectionism seems to side with fascism, with control, with punitive forces, with everything I am against. I am flawed, my work is flawed. But the flaws I think, make the work, so I’m judicious about what I throw out. If the drawing conveys the tension of the pose then it’s in.
Whatever else my drawings are about, they are about vulnerability and being seen. I’m interested in presenting the body in evocative and ambiguous ways–the body displayed, but also self-possessed. And it’s here perhaps that the archetype of the muse is invoked: the (usually) feminine figure that inspires. The person that precipitates the artwork.
Studio Stories, April 2024