The Role Of Visual Arts For Stage Interventions Into The Representation Of The Female Self

A review of the world’s great artists conjures familiar images: Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel; Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night; Pablo Picasso’s The Tragedy. There are many more, of course: Monet, Moya, Warhol, Rembrandt, Kandinsky. What is immediately noticeable, however, upon any brief study of art, is the significant absence of women as heralded artists—not only in our ancient pasts, but even today, amongst valiant efforts for gender equality.

The mirror is a poem that employs stylistic devices literally to enforce its message and ideas.The mirror itself

It is easy to speculate the different meanings of the artwork by the position of the body and the mirrors. For example, a woman looking straight out to the viewer with the mirror turned away could symbolize the woman has something to hide. The woman’s back turned towards the viewer with the mirrors reflection straight on could symbolize vanity. Or in the case of Triptych of Earthly Vanity and Divine Salvation the woman and mirror could both be visible to the viewer to show she is openly vain. And as stated previously a woman’s back reflected in the mirror could show impurity. Mirrors in art tend to be extraordinary, and it is not fanciful to believe that the development of the glass mirror is based on civilization although it can also be altered by the whole perception of human beings. The glass mirrors have affected the transformation referred as the Renaissance

Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it

My series of oil painting and prints, About Jennifer Chung, Except Not, combines the exploration of the self with motifs to convey a message. My initial series encompassed myself and the mirror to tell a story. My personal intentions when creating those series was to express a repressed memory. I experienced unrequited love with another girl during my high school years, and the events that transpired drastically changed how I viewed the world. The first instance occurred when I started to look at myself in the mirror. I eventually found the theme mundane, however, and desired more to discuss ideas while trying to come up with innovative methods to communicate them. This began when I discovered this quote by Eleanor Roosevelt: “Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people”. People are easy to talk about, and I can employ themes and motifs to make it more interesting, but that is about it. So, I emanated from just talking about a mirror to

I acknowledge that the male gaze is present in our modern society and it is what influences our fashion industry to produce imagery that contains visually desirable female bodies. However, what I wish to put forth is that the female body portrayed in my work is used as a beautiful vessel that contains psychological human depth and emotions revealing a multi-faceted human being. By distorting my work I challenged the critiques and conversations during my senior year which encouraged me to break through from beauty and fashion aesthetic in order to get closer to a more conceptual, psychological realm. By breaking through, I put forth what I am most interested in, the psychology of the visceral. Beauty is just a tool to draw the viewer into my

Historically, women have has a large impact on the art community for hundreds of years. In this paper I will show how females how impacted the art movement in the early 19th century and the late 18th century. Females have been depicted in fine works of arts for hundreds of years. In the late 18th century women were painted in backgrounds of landscapes and also they began to be painted nude. In that Time period the men in painting were seen as the minds of the world and the women were seen as the heart, soul, mother and cooks of the world. In this paper I will take two works of art; John Vanderlyn’s “Ariadne Asleep on the Island of Naxos’’ and Lilly Martin Spencer: “Kiss Me and You’ll Kiss the Lasses” and show how the women impacted the arts

Today we will be discussing an art piece by Richard Clayton Payne. This piece was referenced from a popular anime show Shiki (Vampires). Very Representational as it depicts a teenage girl obviously lost in her own beauty. In the actual show she is dribbled with content for outsiders, because she wants to be a model or some sort of celebrity. The overall objective of the piece is to illustrate vanity.

In a survey regarding body image, 69.3% of teenagers said they were not happy with their appearance, and 64% of women in there sixties said they were not happy with their appearance either. The difference between the two, however, is that the majority of the older women were ‘grateful’ about the way they look, while most teenagers described themselves as ‘self-conscious’ when it comes to their physical appearance (“How Women Feel About Their Looks”). These statistics prove that women of all ages are affected by women’s representation in the media, as more often than not, the women presented have unattainable physical characteristics and flawless facial features. John Berger, a British novelist, poet and art critic, wrote Ways of Seeing in 1972, where he focuses on how traditional, European nudist art plays a major role in the images we have of women in our media today. Berger claims that the “social presence of a woman is different in king from that of a man” (Berger 193) because a man’s presence is determined by the potential power which he asserts. As for a woman, the way she portrays and views her self determines how she expects to be treated by those around her. Her presence will be reflected through her actions and physical appearance. Berger uses the difference in social presence to explain why the spectator is always implied to be male when looking at visual representations of females. More than forty years later, Berger’s argument is still valid and can be applied to

Thirdly, Vincent van Gogh’s series of self-portraits is evidence that the artist sees deeply within himself and then can reflect his self-awareness onto his portraits (MacTaggart 1). The paintings are an example that reflects the assertion that the Lady of Shallot is the emblem of artist’s portrayal of reality. Van Gogh perceives his mentality and emotions as energetic rhythmic waves that is imperceptible in reality. A specific example, the most intense self-portrait in art history, “Self Portrait: Saint- Saint-Rémy” by Van Gogh was painted shortly after he left the asylum. Inside the artist’s mind, Van Gogh is depicted still fighting his inner demons. (MacTaggart 1). Supporting the analysis, Van Gogh portrays his energetic turmoil by creating

Mirror is the first poem of the four we will talk about. She is a woman poet in the 20th century. She has a lot of pressure with writing. Who is the speaker in the story? It’s her, herself. Mirror reflects on everything it sees. When we look in the mirror, what are we looking for? Or hoping to see? We are judged every day by so many people. So we care about how we look and we want to present ourselves nicely. That is her point in the poem. She had courage

Although Potter’s work is at times autobiographical, her aim is to present common female perspectives related to the internal psyche. Potter draws on her own life experiences as well as the experiences of women friends to build identifiable narratives in the work. There are several groups of figures in Potter’s production, each with distinctive formal qualities and each using different materials or modeling methods. Although each group of figures has a different focus, all address the social and personal pressures experienced by women. The group of multi-coloured underglazed porcelain figures display more individual characteristics through details such as facial expressions, apparel or other trappings. Using humour and gentle satire, Potter sets up a vignette in each of these pieces. The women are seen performing rigorously to maintain the appearance of youthful beauty and the perception of “doing it all” with ease. Another set of figures includes attire embossed with nature motifs such as leaves and flowers - suggesting the natural cycle of growth, change and mortality inherent to all life. A group of figures without heads or facial identity places attention directly on the body speaking to the pervasiveness of body image angst in our culture. These forms exhibit physical cracks signifying aged skin, but also are indicative of stress fractures in the veneers employed to hide age. Ever present in

Beauty can be viewed in a variety of ways for many different people. Society has made a huge impact on the way people view and think of one another. Since the media has created a specific definition of beauty, people begin to see others in a different light. Those who are considered the “other” are those who the society and media have not deemed beautiful. Alice Walker describes in “Beauty: When the Other Dance is the Self” how her experience with her eye being noticeably damaged had caused her to forget the value of her inner beauty. Similarly, Toni Morrison’s explains in “Strangers” that the media has highlighted the importance of physical appearance instead of a person’s character upon meeting them for the first time. The subject in Johannes Vermeer’s Study of a Young Woman is not conventionally beautiful but Vermeer saw something valuable in the subject that caused him to take his time to paint her. The painting Study of a Young Woman by Johannes Vermeer, challenges the idea of beauty that society has placed on the world and portrays how every human being is beautiful despite those views; although the subject of the painting is “othered” because she is not conventionally beautiful Vermeer choose her because he saw something in her worth more than physical beauty.

There is some disparity between the way critics and philosophers like Judith Butler view Cindy Sherman's work and the way that Cindy Sherman speaks of her photographs. It may be the disparity that exists between many modern artists, who often operate on an intuitive level, and the philosopher critics who comment upon them from a theoretical perspective or a pre-established framework. On one level, Cindy Sherman may only be playing "dress-up" (as she herself admits) in her famous History Portraits (1989-90) (Berne, 2003). On another level, however, her "dressing-up" may be indicative of a deeper problem in modern gender identity theory which is the problem of "becoming" woman (Butler, 1994) or, as Judith Butler sees it, the problem of performativity. In the History Portraits, Sherman may certainly be said to be "performing" and perhaps even attempting to "become" the male and female characters she represents in her work. Indeed, it is upon such a premise that philosopher critics and gender theorists find her work so engaging. This paper will examine Cindy Sherman and her History Portraits in relation to Judith Butler's gender theory, the portrayal of the self, and how gender identity has changed throughout the course of modern history. It will examine representations of womanhood from Romantic Idealism to Post-Modernism and will also

Carol Ann Duffy gives art a new perspective through her poem “Standing Female Nude” by showing us the point of view the model, who poses nude for the artist, has toward art, artists, and the bourgeoisie. The poet questions the concept of ‘great art’ by voicing the perspective of an unfamiliar source. Through the eyes of the speaker, we can clearly see the harsh class injustice inherent in the art world as well as the female suppression in society in general. Duffy also shows that the model isn’t the slightest bit ashamed of what she’s