The Wing Project

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(1)The Wing Project MFA Thesis Helen F. Chang, Candidate. Introduction Is a woman’s gaze different from that of a man when she looks upon the human body with the intention of rendering it as a work of art? What does a woman see when she looks upon the naked figure of another woman? What does she see when she looks upon a naked man? These questions arose by accident during my graduate studies in Taiwan. As an artist growing up in the United States, from childhood when I accompanied my mother to life drawing class to my own classes as an adult in various studios, both the female and male model were equally available for study. Added to the fact that as a woman coming of age in the United states I never questioned my ability to do whatever I set my mind to and my gender, sex and race were never a hindrance to me, either factually or psychologically, I had little or no interest in gender studies or the feminist struggle. They seemed quite passé to me; women’s rights and equality were things that my mother’s generation and before had fought for in the past; the major battles had been won and I and women of my agegroup were free to consolidate the new ground through pursuit of interests other than the mere establishment of equality. As such the various political struggles of feminists in the art world were irrelevant to me. My interest in the history of women in art began to grow as I experienced my first year of graduate school. Male models are very difficult to find in Taiwan and so my nine hours per week of life classes were supported by the hard work of five female models. As the semesters passed I became aware of the oddity this presented – our. 1.

(2) graduate program heavily emphasized the human figure but could only provide us with the female human figure. So it was entirely by accident of the unavailability of the male figure that I came to experience what other women experienced when they first entered the academy as art students. Thus faced with this situation, the question of what women do in art suddenly became relevant to me. I wanted to find out what women painters had done with the male figure in the relative enlightenment of the modern era where women have had full access to the male nude for several decades. I cheerfully sought out several books and discovered a paucity of modern women painting the male nude and a theoretically underdeveloped subject. According to Edward Lucie-Smith, The reasons for this are complex. One is the visceral distaste for all nude representations which inspired many feminists. If the female nude chiefly aroused their ire, then the male nude also attracted condemnation, since in the eyes of some feminists every form of nude representation was an expression of patriarchal control on the part of the artist or photographer who made it…Alternatively, if this version was not acceptable, then images of naked males could be seen as threatening icons of masculine potency. That if male nudes in paintings and photographs were not a form of rape, then they threatened rape…In addition to this, feminist art often tended to avoid established forms such as painting and sculpture, on the grounds that these are freighted with patriarchal meaning, and has turned to conceptual expressions and performance work, in which the image of the nude male seldom has a place.1 (Adam: the male figure in art, pp. 13-14). In an environment where the human figure is privileged as the main topic for representation, a nude representation of the human figure is the record of the gaze of the artist. The artist’s gaze takes five main forms: the heterosexual woman or man upon a body of the same sex; the heterosexual woman or man upon a body of the opposite sex; the homosexual woman or man upon a body of the same sex; the homosexual woman or man upon a body of the opposite sex; and the bisexual woman 1. Adam: the male figure in art, pp. 13-14. 2.

(3) or man upon bodies of either the same or different sex. (In some instances other commonly discussed power relationships such as race and class become an issue; these relationships are not discussed here because of a general homogeneity of Taiwanese race and class wherein differences are not perceptible without interviewing that is beyond the scope of this paper.) Lucie-Smith’s explanation for the paucity of woman representing the male nude in art is a good first step based on the conventionally accepted feminists views of women and men’s relationships through visual culture. However, if such paintings are painted by women, logically speaking, the converse of the male gaze domination of women should be true. Naked images of men painted by women would be expressions of female domination of men and images of naked women painted by women would be “threatening icons” of female potency. So we return to the question of what women see when they paint the unclothed human figure, male or female. The fact that women find both the female and male nude offensive, and for different reasons, suggests that the issue is complex. Lucie-Smith also says that …one of the subjects any author of a book [about the male figure] must immediately consider is the different ways in which the two genders seem to react to this kind of subject-matter. It has long been accepted that men respond very directly to representations of nude women…The question is, do women react or have they reacted in the same way to representations of nude men?2. The answer to his question is generally made from a socio-biological point of view that basically says women are not visually stimulated the way men are because their brains are wired differently. I question this answer because a woman who is a visual artist is obviously a person who works with and responds to visual stimulation, even if not in the exact same way men respond to visual stimulation. Further, I would. 2. Ibid., pp. 8-9. 3.

(4) imagine that a woman visual artist who is intensely and intimately involved with a man and happens to work figuratively would eventually use the figure of her beloved as subject matter for a painting. I will argue that the continued absence of the nude male figure from women’s painting is because heterosexual women continue to have a residual, culturally encoded modesty with regard to their own sexuality and all matters related thereto, including the appearance of the naked figure of their sexual other, the male, in art. I will then postulate that as women engaged in the women’s movement, a need was felt for the creation of a woman’s identity as an artist – which focused almost entirely on defining women in direct opposition to men. This led to a situation where women’s art concerned women and depicted women, and, combined with latent prudery, further contributing to the absence of the male nude from women’s art. I will conclude that women of my generation and younger have grown up with the assumption of equality to men and have done so in an increasingly gender-balanced environment where it is not necessary to “colonize” the body of the Other and this lack of drive to colonize the Other also contributes to the absence of the male nude from women’s paintings. I will then discuss my own artwork, which includes male and female figures, both clothed and nude, as a gender-balanced body of work that reflects my experience as a creator of visual culture in the life of a middle-classed, educated, married heterosexual woman and perhaps mother in the current era.. Prudery An investigation into the significance of the naked human body, women’s sexuality and women’s self-censure in the Western European art tradition starts with Western Europe’s origin myth, the story of Genesis in the Bible. In Genesis 3, when. 4.

(5) Adam and Eve ate the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, “…the eyes of both of them were opened and they discovered that they were naked…”3 When God searched for Adam and asked him why he hid himself, Adam replied that “…I was afraid because I was naked…”4 From this moment on, a state of nakedness in an adult person, one whose eyes are “opened”, is a reason for shame. Knowledge itself is gained only in disobedience of God, the father, and the first couple is cast out of paradise forever for their mental advancement. Traditionally, Eve is blamed for being the weak link who convinced Adam to be disobedient and thus caused man to lose paradise. For her role in this disobedience, Eve is particularly punished: “…you shall be eager/feel an urge for your husband…”5 Genesis teaches that nudity is shame, it is woman’s fault that humans no longer dwell in paradise and that God has ordained women to be sexually desirous of men as a punishment. The combination of shame at being naked and women’s God-ordained sexuality-as-punishment is focal to the role women traditionally played in the world of art. Since nudity was shameful and women’s sexuality was an uncontrollable part of her nature, women were not generally present in the Renaissance studio, that site where the modern investigation of the human figure began. The Counter-Reformation brought about increasing conservatism in all aspects of European life. By the time the industrial revolution created the bourgeoisie, a class that had the education, desire and leisure to produce art as a vocation and artists such as the Impressionists, women’s modesty had become a fundamental part of the average bourgeois woman’s psyche. The class of the bourgeois woman was difficult to separate from that of the lower class woman. She was not an aristocrat, born to a name and position. From the point of view of the aristocracy, those who controlled society, the bourgeoise’s 3. The New English Bible, p. 3 Ibid., p. 3 5 Ibid., p. 4 4. 5.

(6) position was created by wealth and wealth alone. In all other aspects, she was a commoner. As such, the bourgeois woman needed to create an identity for herself, a way of separating herself from the common woman and placing herself in a position superior to the common woman. As society became commodified, women, largely unskilled and uneducated, had two things they could sell: labor and sex. Labor meant that one left the house, so the bourgeois woman cloistered herself in her house as much as possible. Sex as a commodity was clearly a violation of religious prohibitions against fornication and adultery, so the bourgeois woman became virtuous to the point of being prudish. Her identity was then clearly separated from that of the common woman; she did not leave her house, or at least, she did not leave her house without proper chaperonage, and she was virtuous, abstaining from sex except for procreation. Michel Foucault states that [l]a sexualité est alors soigneusement renfermée. Elle emménage. La famille conjugale la confisque. Et l’absorbe tout entière dans le sérieux de la fonction de reprodiure…Le couple, légitime et procréateur, fait la loi. Il s’impose comme modèle, fait valoir la norme, détient la vit garde le droit de parler en se réservent le principe du secret. Dans l’espace social, comme au cœur de chaque maison, un seul lieu de sexualité reconnue, mais utilitaire et fecund : la chamber des parents. Le reste n’a plus qu’a s’estomper; la convenance des attitudes esquive le corps, la décence des mots blanchit les discours.6. Other trends also affected and reinforced the bourgeois woman’s attachment to her cloistered, virtuous identity. Women who worked had to travel freely about to go to the site of their work. Outside-the-home thus became dangerous. The constant flow of wage money into a man’s pocket left him free to patronize prostitutes. The ready access to sex through money that he enjoyed meant that a bourgeois woman needed even more desperately to define herself as not-prostitute. Also, at this time,. 6. Histoire de la sexualité – la volonté de savoir, p. 10. 6.

(7) women’s sexuality was medicalized. The old myth of women being naturally sexual became a medically classified disease, according to Foucault, the [h]ystérisation du corps de la femme : triple processus par lequel le corps de la femme a été analysé – qualifié et disqualifié – comme corps intégralement saturé de sexualité; par lequel ce corps a été integré, sous l’effet d’une pathologie qui lui serait intrinsèque, au champ des pratiques médicales; par lequel enfin il a été mis en communication organique avec le corps social (dont il doit assurer la fécondité réglé), l’espace familial (dont il doit être un element substantial et fonctionnel) et la vie des enfants (qu’il produit at qu’il doit garantir, par une respnsabilité biologico-morale qui dure tout au long de l’éducation) : la Mère, avec son image en négatif qui est la “femme nerveuse”, constitue la form la plus visible de cette hystérisation.7 A bourgeois woman who did not wish to be considered insane – hysterical – and perhaps even institutionalized was doubly on her guard to not appear sexual in any way. Women thus crafted and maintained an elaborate and repressive system of morality in which they denied any and all sexuality. Society lauded them for their efforts and reinforced this behavior, and women were carefully watched and criticized severely if anything remotely resembling sexuality should poke out from the modest and moral surface. When moral behavior was so precious and difficult to maintain, the idea of showing a woman a naked man, to whom she was not married, for the purpose of visual pleasure or even artistic endeavor was anathema. The sexuality of a woman who drew, painted or modeled the naked male form would be drawn out and her modest, socially acceptable morality would be corrupted. She had to be protected from such a thing. The effects of such an environment on a woman who wanted to paint would have been profound. First, the lack of mobility was crippling, as expressed in the diaries of Marie Bashkirseff: What I long for is the freedom of going about alone…Do you imagine that I get much good from what I see, chaperoned as I am, and when, 7. Ibid., p. 137. 7.

(8) in order to go to the Louvre, I must wait for my carriage, my lady companion, my family?8 Copying in the Louvre was a time-established method for artists to learn from the examples of the great masters; many fine examples of the male body, nude and otherwise, are available at the Louvre and would have provided a reasonable way for women to circumvent the moral impossibility of working from the live male nude. However, such exercises, if done well, take time. As denizens of the modern world where everything from dress to food to transportation is done with convenience in mind, we are hard put to imagine how much time and effort it would take to prepare a minimum of two women, in their corsets and enormously heavy dresses for a trip to the museum in a carriage with at least one horse and staffed by at least a driver, and how much time and energy would be left after the preparations for actual sketching or painting in the museum before the ladies were obliged to return home for another change of clothes and their evening meal, which, if they had the leisure to paint in the Louvre, can safely be assumed to be a formal one. If women were the inferior artists, as men of the late 1900’s are known to have said, it must have been at least in part due to the fact that the basic privileges of leisurely observation, copying and creation was closed to them. In spite of this restriction on their mobility, a few women, fortunate in their families’ willingness to allow them time and financial support, did manage to paint and produce well-known, recognized works of art. Two such women are Mary Cassat (1844-1926) and Berthe Morisot (1841-1895), both respectable middle-class women from good families. Cassat produced many fine portraits of women in the interiors they inhabited with the children they reared and the servants who supported their lifestyle. Morisot did the same, with the addition of landscapes and an occasional 8. Vision and Difference, p. 70. 8.

(9) glimpse of a man as part of the background and environment in which these privileged women lived. The only flesh revealed in Morisot’s work is that of her daughter’s nursemaid’s breast, and in some very stylized sketches of female nudes produced towards the end of her life when it seems she finally garnered the courage to engage a model. Although both these women obviously knew and consorted with men, and famous artists at that, neither was willing to cross the established social boundary and ask one of their male friends to sit for them, not even for a fully clothed portrait. “Morisot herself did not paint portraits of her male colleagues, since it was thought inappropriate for an unmarried woman to ask a man to sit for her.”9 Her work displays extreme restraint when compared to that of her contemporaries such as Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas. Obviously, this reticence was due to the problem of prudery in society as described above and resulted in the exclusion of women from life classes where the male nude was present. Thomas Eakins (1844 – 1916) said, during the controversy that forced him to resign his position as director of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, of an art school with women as well as men students: I am sure that the study of anatomy is not going to benefit any grown person who is not willing to see or be seen seeing the naked figure and my lectures are only for serious students wishing to become painters and sculptors. (1886)10. Of note is that Eakins referred to “any grown person”, including both men and women, and the willingness not only to see the naked figure but also the willingness to be seen seeing the naked figure, by which he tacitly acknowledges that the pressure of society upon the woman who was willing to break norms and look upon the naked 9. Berthe Morisot, p. 28 Adam: the male in figure art, p. 12. 10. 9.

(10) male figure would be subject to criticism from society. In the cases of Cassat and Morisot, neither woman dared to paint even the portrait of a fully clothed male friend, although Morisot herself posed (clothed) several times for Edouard Manet. A contemporary artist who was willing to record the fact that she had seen the male figure naked was Camille Claudel. Claudel, who lives on in fame as a mistress of Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), the bulk of whose work is ironically displayed in the Musée Rodin in Paris, was a talented sculptress from a respectable, middle class family whose mother did not approve at all of her daughter’s aspirations. This maternal disapproval was merely the familial embodiment of prevalent contemporary attitudes towards women at that time. Claudel modeled nude human figures and dared to express, publicly, intimate emotions, many of which were a reflection of sexual activity. That meant that she was in close proximity with naked humans, both male and female, and had experienced sex outside the legitimate boundaries of marriage and procreation. From a contemporary point of view, Claudel no doubt satisfactorily fulfilled all the grimmest expectation for a woman behaving as she did – she became the mistress, not the wife, of a man, was a failure as an artist, became paranoid, and was eventually institutionalized (1913) by her embarrassed family, never to create art again.. Woman as Artist – Formation of Self-Identity Modern attitudes towards the capabilities of women have greatly improved and with this improvement in attitude has come complete freedom of women in the art world to do whatever they please. However, the identity formation of the middle class woman as artist has taken place in an amorphous and tacit initiation process by which women have defined themselves as not-men. By definition, initiation, a. 10.

(11) process in which the initiands withdraw from the world and determine themselves in opposition to it, must be followed by reintegration, and this stage has not yet occurred in the identity formation of the woman as artist. As a result, women’s art, such as Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party or Jenny Saville’s female nudes, has been and continues to be focused inward, towards an exploration of women, women’s issues, and ultimately women’s bodies in spite of persistent critiques of essentialism. The issue here is not a critique of feminist artists’ and their work, but rather of the body of critical work and feminist theorists who continue to ignore any work that is not of this genre. In contrast with these works which focus heavily on critique of the status of women in society is Nothing but the Girl. In the introduction to the book, Susie Bright describes the past dearth of women creating visual images of what women want to see: Quite simply, if you wanted to view lesbians, you had to turn to the male photographers who loved and deified them…Femininity and female sexuality were understood by the male gaze, which could be loving, daring, eloquent or brutal – but invariably viewed from his position outside her body.11. Nothing but the Girl is relevant to an inquiry into women’s gaze and what women want to see because it was created by women for women. It is self-avowedly erotic, and “high art”, as practiced in the academy, is generally supposed to be “above” erotica in spite of the continuous flaunting of nudity in a society that is determinedly clothed. Regardless of whether or not Nothing but the Girl is “high art” or pornography, it is a fascinating breakthrough in the of the situation surrounding women’s sexuality as expressed through visual images and if Bright’s statement above not longer applies to lesbian-generated images, the criticism is still valid for 11. Nothing but the Girl: The Blatant Lesbian Image, p. 6. 11.

(12) heterosexual female image creation. Nothing but the Girl presents images produced by women looking at what they find sexually appealing. It is frank and honest, and, according to Bright, this sort of art when published in On Our Backs often generated intense criticism as being “’antifeminist, anti-woman, anti-Semitic and racist’”12 This criticism arises from the Victorian prudery that has become our habitus13 as women; we believe that we, like “high art”, are above sexuality and the body and strive to enforce this divorce from flesh upon other women as well. Nothing but the Girl is thus an informative, daring and important first step in breaking the Victorian habitus of women’s rejection of their own sexuality. As such, I have yet to see Nothing but the Girl’s equivalent in womengenerated erotic art by and for heterosexual women; female sexuality is thus marginalized by association with lesbianism and classified as “deviant” behavior. If such a book were produced by heterosexual women, it would run the risk of being criticized as having been produced by women who have fallen into the trap of objectifying themselves with a male gaze.. Gender Balance The Western middleclass woman artist of the 21st century is able to capitalize on the trials and tribulations of her forbears: she is free to move about as she pleases in the world, she enjoys access to nudes of any sort, and she has a wealth of critical writing to document the women’s movement and women’s growth as artists in the 20th century, something that had to be created ex nihilo. Further, society is much more open with regards to sex and sexual education and so the body of the Other, once so exotic and titillating to male artists of the past, is not so fascinating for the 12 13. Ibid., p. 7 The Logic of Practice, p. 9. 12.

(13) contemporary woman artist. She, drawing on the riches of the past, may not feel the need to paint or engage in traditional genres of representation in traditional materials but may experiment with mixed media and abstraction. She may even paint flowers like Monair Hyman and not fear belittlement as “just a woman”, only capable of painting pretty and simple subject matter. And so the male nude continues to be absent from the artistic endeavors of women. What does the heterosexual female painter see when she gazes upon that established institution of art, the female nude? The gaze of the heterosexual male painter is straightforward, whether it is Rembrandt’s loving paintings of various wives and mistresses or Corbet’s painstaking renditions of female genitalia – the woman is the Other, either loved or lusted after as the sexual opposite of the heterosexual male painter. The heterosexual female painter’s reasons for painting the female nude are less directly obvious. The female nude is an established artistic element in the modern tradition of painting, a basic step that, up to the beginning of the 20th century, needed to be mastered by all budding artists. But women in Paris, the acknowledged capital of modern painting, were often denied access to the studios where the male nude was painted. The male nude is arguably an equally basic element of the western painting tradition that should be mastered along with the female; one needs to paint Adam as well as Eve. However, such balance was not to be achieved by women such as Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassat, both respectable, upper-middle class women who enjoyed well-established painting careers and some lasting fame. As stated above, two women mostly painted clothed human figures, often friends and family, and if a breast was bared, it was of a lower class and engaged in the noble effort of nursing a baby.. 13.

(14) When a heterosexual woman gazes upon the female nude, what does she see? She sees a reflection of herself, different in some ways and similar in others. She sees another woman who is in the same state of development, a stage through which she has already passed, or one that she will eventually attain. She sees the other woman as beautiful, or as expressive of a certain idea or message. She identifies with the other woman’s exposure, feels liberated by the nude’s freedom or touched by her vulnerability. She may even see a sexually attractive person, because she, being accustomed to the sexualized gaze of men upon the female nude in the modern art tradition, may have adopted this gaze herself. As a result of this intimacy and identification with the female nude, the heterosexual female painter must establish a distance between herself and the nude female subject. The process of painting is otherwise too revealing of and too close to the painter herself. She is like a surgeon who must become habituated to the frequent sight of internal organs and blood that should not be revealed and who must commit acts of violence upon a living or dead human body, which acts normal people cannot conscience. The heterosexual female painter must learn to violate the personal space of another woman with her eyes while still preserving her own personal space. This process is different from the process that the heterosexual male painter engages in when painting the male nude. While the male painter may indeed identify with the male nude is his painting, the male is not ever considered the “weaker” sex in Western Culture and the male nude, unless portraying Adam cast out from the garden, is usually the body of the hero. So the male painter, when painting the male nude, is merely engaging in a bit of self-aggrandizement. What does the heterosexual female painter see when she gazes upon the male nude? Does she see an erotic other? The heterosexual female painter has come of age. 14.

(15) in a world and a society that is still uneasy with the idea of female sexuality and she has already developed a practice of looking objectively at the female nude. Furthermore, with the noted exceptions of homosexual male artists, the art tradition itself reinforces an objective gaze upon the male nude. The heterosexual female painter thus looks objectively at the male nude the same way as she looks at the female nude and cuts off her sexuality. To look at the male nude in any other way would immediately shift her work into the realm erotica, of dangerous women who have and enjoy sexuality, who are marginalized as deviant and must be controlled by society lest they infect us all. The entire habitus of the modern art tradition is that of the heterosexual male painter. The heterosexual female painter unconsciously adopts his gaze because that is the way art has always been done. She has seen the last five hundred years of painting, mostly painted by men, she has learned that this particular viewpoint is the viewpoint of great art, and, not wishing to fail by being mediocre, she cultivates a male eye. What exactly would be a female eye with regards to the human figure? A female point of view concerns itself with whatever is important to the painter in her particular social setting and her experience of the world from that position. These might include her ideas, her fantasies, her location, her social class, her race, her gender, her reproductivity, her lovers, her family and her friends. Further, for a female viewpoint to be mature and established as is the tradition of the male gaze, the female painter’s work cannot merely concern itself with reaction to the established male art tradition. The reaction can exist only if the elements for the reaction exist, and if the art world is to be coaxed into a more balanced state women must make art that stands on its own and is not merely a reaction to what is perceived as repression.. 15.

(16) Why do so few women paint the male nude, now that social mores are less restrictive and minds are supposedly more open? When asked, some women painters have told me that they think the male body and the male genitalia are not attractive. Other women, who are not painters, say that they prefer to see a man wearing jeans and no shirt, or shorts that display muscular legs, to viewing a naked man. Women’s bodies, they say, are beautiful while men’s bodies are not. Both the women painters and viewers have emphasized the fact that the male genitalia are obtrusive – they stick out and cannot be ignored. Perhaps this, too, is habitus, still at work after all these years. Women painters grow up out of the western painting tradition that finds the female nude acceptable for whatever reason, and so women painters continue to look at the human figure with a male gaze and continue to find the female body more aesthetically pleasing than the male. Perhaps “Victorian” social mores are more deeply inscribed in our subconsciousness than we are aware and women’s sexuality is by definition deviant and women painters do not wish to see themselves as deviant.. Conclusion There are numerous books written from a feminist viewpoint that deal with the question of women in the field of artistic creation through the ages. However, because the gaze of women could not be directed towards men and especially the naked man, the body of work produced by women tends to lack men. Thus, feminist analysis of these works tends to be directed at analyzing women’s status and roles in society and their representation of other women. In general, this lacuna points out a fundamental immaturity of feminist thought in the current time; in point of fact, men exist, women have complex relationships with men and these relationships need not. 16.

(17) be a negative situation for the women. Women in art is necessarily a subject that is much more dynamic and positive in the present time. By directing their critical gaze towards the art of history and without balancing the past against the present situation, feminist art historians build a bridge with the past that allows the bitter past to infect present experience. The horse of patriarchal domination is dead, putrescence has set in, and no amount of beating will bring new aegis to the feminist cause. While a knowledge of history is necessary, women, as an emergingly empowered social group, need to work energetically in the present, to envision themselves as relevant to the current state of art, make themselves a presence in art, and by doing so create a new art history where the women who create do not have to be “rehabilitated” back into the mainstream of history like some reactionary sent down to correct herself in the countryside but are from the very first part of the mainstream. THE WING PROJECT – DISCUSSION OF WORKS INTRODUCTION The works described here include wings, conceptualized human figures and portraits. The wings and conceptualized human figures are expressions of some ideas of mine that developed over the past five years while I worked for a patent law firm in Taipei. The portraits are of my husband and two friends who have been endlessly supportive and influential in these years of work and study.. The drawings of the wings have been given nonsensical numbers, as if they were part of a larger body of work such as an invention patent. Many people, including me, have or have had deep misconceptions about what a patent is. In fact, the entire concept of “intellectual property” is rather subtler than one might imagine from common knowledge. The idea that most people have is of a genius who invents. 17.

(18) something new, patents it, and then becomes rich because he or she can now sell the invention.. In fact, very little in this world is new, as one discovers when applies to the U.S. Patent Office for a patent; if you have thought of it, someone else has already thought of it, or at least something very similar. The burden then falls upon the would-be inventive genius to prove that his or her invention is in some small way not merely an obvious improvement over prior art. In fact, if one is really a true inventor and familiar with the field in which one is inventing, one should have already searched for, found, and prepared an adequate response to such prior art.. Coming as I do from an American cultural background, this idea of “modified” creativity is fascinating. The modernist emphasis in art is one of “absolute” creativity – complete originality – and copying is frowned upon. In contrast, the entire postmodern art movement depends heavily upon the concept and act of “appropriation”14, the use of other people’s work or ideas in ways that make them one’s own. Appropriation, when I first encountered the term, seemed to me nothing more than a legitimized form of plagiarism, that sin of sins of the academic world.. However, in the age of the internet, where ideas and images can be instantly duplicated, the original concept of intellectual property and the patent system accreted upon the basis of law seem woefully clumsy and outdated. I have had to modify my thinking and admit that it may be advantageous and even more conducive to creativity. 14. Critical Terms for Art History, pp. 116 – 128. 18.

(19) to have a free sharing of ideas, especially when it comes to art. Symbols have the ability to stimulate a reaction only if they participate in common knowledge, which is only possible if they have been seen before.. Apropos to this, in my paintings, I have appropriated a wing from one of Leonardo da Vinci’s flying machine designs. I have done this not only because his drawings are lovely but because I needed an effective iconic symbol to represent the concept of flight, one that is recognizable and resonant to any person somewhat versed in Western art traditions. Da Vinci is popularly known as the original creative genius, possessor of an unfettered imagination, and is himself the iconic symbol for the Western scientific tradition that eventually gave rise to the Age of Reason and which tradition the U.S. Patent Office continues to reward by granting patents to intellectual property in a good, logical fashion. Many patent firms use da Vinci’s drawings as wallpaper for their websites, as if they might by contagious magic participate in the creativity that we as a culture accord the ancient master. Da Vinci’s wing therefore is in my mind the fitting symbol for human endeavor, the desire to solve problems, and the desire to reach beyond the limits of the flesh moving about on two legs on the face of the earth.. Along with the wings I have interspersed various allegorical human figures referring to ideas or experiences that rang true with the idea of human endeavor and the desire to fly as I delved into the concept of the wing. Three of the allegories are male nudes while one is female; this choice is deliberately made in view of the fact that men do not bear children and thus have an air of perpetual striving about them. Throughout history, mortality for the male has been something terrifying and the. 19.

(20) terror has not been assuageable except by constant artistic creation, their only substitute for the biological creation that women naturally enjoy. Women, now given a choice by science and culture as to whether or not they wish to bear, have only in the past century had the leisure to contemplate such esoteric ontological questions. Choice is both a privilege and a responsibility, and the one allegorical female is shown as an expression of hope.. The portraits are the foundation of this body of work, for they are my link with life. I usually paint as verbally-inclined people might keep a diary; I paint the things I see and the world around me and this becomes a record of how I have lived my life. Portraits of friends are extremely personal because they are the record of many hours intensely spent focusing on a single person. As such I am honored that these three friends, amongst them my husband, have each sacrificed several days of their lives and granted me the privilege of painting their portraits. At the time when these portraits were painted, I was deeply influenced by the works of Lucian Freud. Freud’s portraits are not only intimate investigations into the nature of his friends and family members but also a love affair with the thicknesses and layering of oil paint. Freud really paints and I have tried to learn from his example.. THE PAINTINGS. 1.. Figure 4a – The Wing Imagined. The wing is imagined as a white sail, made of geometric shapes, in a turbulent medium. This painting is the starting point for The Wing Project. I first built a small. 20.

(21) model of a wing, using wooden dowels. In high school, I spent summers on Great Gull Island, a small island off Long Island’s Orient Point, as a field assistant for a research project that tracked the nesting and migration patterns of the Common Tern. Terns are extremely elegant and sleek and are aces in the sky. I drew on my memory of their wings to construct my little model, and tried to make the long bar homologous to the primary feathers particularly long.. A wing enables flight by simultaneously creating so much air pressure under the wing and a vacuum above the wing that the wing rises up into the emptier space above it. This is calculated as lift for a wing, the amount of force needed to lift the wing. The equation for lift is given as follows:. L = Cl r v2/2 A. where Cl is the lift coefficient r is the density of the thing to be lifted v is the velocity (of what) A is the wing area15. On the surface, the equation seems blissfully simple and understandable. Cl, however, is where the complexity of this equation lies. Cl contains all the specific needs of the body to be lifted, and Cl must be determined experimentally. Cl is also only appropriate for a fixed, inflexible wing. One cannot, for example, determine the lift generated by a bird’s wing from this equation because it is flexible, changes shape. 15. www.grc.nasa.gov. 21.

(22) and configuration in instant response to the environment in which the bird flies. Military research has begun to try to model the feedback system by which each feather, muscle and nerve in a bird’s wing responds to flight conditions, but the complexity of the circuitry of such a model has made for slow progress.. As I built my little model I was faced with the difficulty of building a machine that can actually fly, the limitations of the human body and how miraculous birds really are. All we humans can do is crudely approximate flight with fixed-wing aircraft or sports like hang gliding. Figure 4a is thus a fantasy of a wing sailing in the air but without a human because humans do not fly and are not, in fact, suited to flight. Even with a wing attached, our bones are too dense, our muscles too weak with respect to the force necessary to become airborne. We are not made for flight.. 2.. Figure 4b – Schematic Drawing for a Wing. This wing is an impression of the famed da Vinci wing, drawn from memory. The materials are oil paint and wax medium on gessoed board. I decided to draw on da Vinci because if one thinks of a flying machine, one immediately thinks of da Vinci’s elegant sepia sketches of wings and air currents. Da Vinci is the quintessential mechanical engineer and his machines are the precursors of the Baroque machines conceived in the Age of Reason, which allow men to do more than is naturally possible for their physical selves. This painting is a progression from the previous one, imagined and built according to my own experience and observation, to incorporate design features of a historical wing, possibly even a tested wing.. 22.

(23) 3.. Figure 4c – Schematic Drawing for a Wing with Differentiation of. Materials and Top View. After painting Figure 4b, I felt I needed to return to my source material rather than relying on memory of a drawing seen many years ago. This wing was drawn with direct reference to da Vinci’s schematic drawings of his flying apparatus. Of interest is that da Vinci himself realized that the human body was too weak to actually fly, as a bird, on two wings extending from the shoulder joint. Instead, he created a flying platform with four wings attached, which the aviator would beat by means of a crank for the hands and pedals for the feet. Da Vinci’s drawings show a clear differentiation of materials; he indicates wooden supports for the main body of the wing and reed attachments with string for the sail to reduce the weight of the apparatus by as much as possible. One can only imagine the effort necessary to become airborne and the noise that such a machine would have made in the process. This is not the elegant, effortless flight of dreams but the reality of hard work to attain an unnatural goal.. This painting is a watercolor sealed with colored wax medium. I did not add any further oil painting to preserve the delicacy of the drawing, in keeping with da Vinci’s original work.. 4.. Figure 5a – The Wing Imagined in Flight. The Wing Imagined in Flight is the fantasy wing of Figure 4a, in the sky, with a second wing-like shape in the background. The wing contacts the side of the. 23.

(24) painting to create ambiguity with regard to its structure. The rest of the structure of this wing falls outside the territory of the painting and so remains unknown. The creation of ambiguity was suggested to me by a friend, David Cornberg. He was of the opinion, and I agree, that the wing in the center of the painting was too much like an etymological exhibit for display in a biology museum. The wing is now set in motion, and is allowed to move out of the realm of description into action. The winglike shape behind the wing is perhaps a bird wing, the ghostly model for the engineered wing, or it may be a record in air turbulence of where the wing just was. Again, the idea was to create a feeling of movement, this time through repetition of shape.. 5.. Figure 5b – Large Schematic Drawing for a Wing. This is a large painting based on the da Vinci wing. In painting it, I drew on my memory of a set of antique wooden yokes for a pony; these seemed the proper construction model for a pre-industrial age machine. The wood is sturdy and dark. The structure is reinforced with leather because da Vinci says that iron joints will succumb easily to stress. The form is designed with function in mind; any elegance or beauty is accidental.. Again, when I extrapolated this larger version from my original smaller painting, I took care to place the wing so that its mechanism abuts the edge of the painting and creates the illusion of more that is not revealed.. The materials are acrylic, wax and oil on canvas.. 24.

(25) 6.. Vinci Tentavit – Confronting the Void. “VINCI TENTAVIT” means, “da Vinci tried”. This is the human trying to figure out how to get from here to there as the bird flies, rather than by the rather more mundane footpath that indubitably meanders down the hillside from the high place whereon he stands. It is also the human confronting his limitations, his humanity, the very fact that he is a human and that he eventually will die. This is the human considering his options for superceding his fate, rising above it.. Why a man? Because men are one step removed from immortality and creation. They are necessary for child bearing, but they do not actually bear the child. As such they never experience the liminality of pregnancy and the miracle of one becoming two; their mortality weighs heavier upon them than it does upon women who carry within them, even if it is not realized, the potential to create life.. 7.. The Astronomer. The Astronomer is similar to Vinci Tentavit, but he is looking up, past the confines of Earth, out into the void and at the distant stars. The Astronomer is the dreamer version of da Vinci; he is concerned not with practicality but with pure science for its own sake. I felt The Astronomer was a necessary part of The Wing Project because he ties the project to space exploration.. 25.

(26) Space exploration is an incredible thing, both from a science-engineering perspective and a social-political perspective. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union and the United States were sworn enemies; they had Mir, we had Skylab, and the two countries were in a duel to the death over who was better armed, better scientifically, better engineering-wise. The idea of combining abilities in a joint venture to explore space was pure science fiction, unimaginable except with extreme tension in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. And yet, here we are in the year 2002, the International Space Station is a visible reality and has been possible only through international cooperation spearheaded by the polar enemies, the Russians and the Americans, who now live together in and run the International Space Station. The existence and continuing construction of the International Space Station is a thing of hope to me, tangible evidence that great differences are resolvable, and that human endeavor can accomplish great things when people cooperate.. 8.. The Diver. The Tomb of the Diver is located in Paestum, Italy, at the site of the ancient Greek colony of Poseidoneium. The Diver, for whom the tomb is named, is a painting about which is said, “…questo tuffo possa rapresentare metoraficamente il passagio dalla vita alla morte.”16 The Diver is part of the Wing Project because the Diver is what drives humans to invent. The Diver falls, unstopped, unable to stop himself, towards his inevitable death. He is composed, controlled, dignified and beautiful, and mid-journey he presents the fantasy of flight, but rational knowledge tells us he cannot stop his plunge.. 16. www.interware.it/user/mike/tsr/Arte/greci/tuffo.html. 26.

(27) I first saw the Diver when I was fifteen, on a trip to Italy with my Latin class to visit classical sites and gain a better understanding of the world we studied in the dry, ancient texts. The trip, only two weeks long, left a memory so wonderful that, like a first lover, I now fear to revisit it lest it be somewhat less vivid that I remember. During the trip, we also visited the island of Capri and traveled by cable car up Tiberius’ infamous villa, whence he in his madness was reputed to have tossed unsatisfactory dinner guests off the cliff into the sea, hundreds of feet below. Wanting to more fully experience the great height, but quite afraid of losing my head and falling, I lay full length upon the ground and hung my head over the edge of the cliff; far below I saw eagles soaring on updrafts, even farther below I saw the white band of the strand and the water quickly deepening to the famous blue of the Mediterranean.. Today, some twenty years later, I have combined these two memories of the Diver and the cliffs of Capri to make my own rendition of the Diver. It is on the one hand, my recognition of my own mortality as a human being. On the other hand, from my viewpoint above the Diver as I watch his descent, it is also a realization that my impending maternity allows me to escape the fate of the Diver.. 9.. Jenny Ascending from the Depths of the Dive Pool. The first sport I ever willingly participated in was SCUBA diving. SCUBA was given as an academic class at my university, and was a severe commitment of both time and financial resources. I liked it so much that I became an avid swimmer. 27.

(28) and served as a teaching assistant for the course. Once, when we were still snorkeling, the professor asked one of the teaching assistants, a young woman named Jenny, to demonstrate a proper ascent from the bottom of the dive pool, a depth of 12 feet. Jenny accordingly dove down and then ascended slowly in a stream of silver bubbles.. The image of her rising through the water was part of the growing realization I experienced that water is a medium just like air but thicker, and all the things that swim in it navigate this medium just as birds navigate the air. As earthbound creatures, we move two dimensionally, three if you count time. But in the water, you must negotiate three or four dimensions. When you first get used to your flippers and your various flotation devices and breathing apparatus, you feel that you have really augmented your powers. But the first time you try to catch a creature that is adapted to life in the water, like a seal or a fish, the creature gives one little push with its fins and leaves you, with all your empowering gear, far behind.. I have painted my image of Jenny’s ascent as part of the wing project because her slow rise to the surface is an expression of hope, that we as humans can experience media other than the air and the locomotion other than walking on the ground, and though we never belong there, we can learn something from our own limitations.. 10.. Nude on Black Couch. This painting is an attempt to treat the nude as simply part of the interior, to not privilege it any further over the couch, floor, brick wall, or any other part of the. 28.

(29) room. It is also a stab at painting the male nude, which I have not had an opportunity to paint since I last took class at the Art Student’s League in New York City, almost ten years ago. Finally, it is also a tribute to my husband, who has allowed me to paint and draw him in the eight years of our acquaintance in a variety of poses and states of dress.. The nude as an equal part of the interior is an interesting challenge because the nude, when painted, is more often than not the focus of the painting. I have attempted to challenge the viewer’s eye to decide for itself what it wishes to focus on by painting the wall and curtain brightly, by paying attention to the tiles of the terrace floor and wall, and by using a saturated warm yellow for the wooden floor. The darks are also rich, so that every color and tone in the human figure is directly opposed by a color or tone in the rest of the painting. Further, the paint throughout the painting is thick and textured so that no part protrudes unequally. It is left to the viewer to decide what is more important to his or her eye.. My studio work in graduate school has been focused entirely on the female nude. As a result, it has become an irrational need of mine as a woman painter to paint the male nude, if only to see what it feels like. By relegating the nude to part of the interior, as best as I can considering my relationship to this particular nude – and in fact it may have been easier because I am accustomed to this nude and so there was not the fascination of the exotic other – I have attempted to explore the male nude as seen by the female eye in an objective way.. 29.

(30) As a logical progression from the consideration of the male nude, I must discuss my relationship with this particular nude. When my husband and I first met, I persuaded him to model without clothes for me. As an artist, this seemed quite natural and reasonable to me because I am comfortable with the unclothed human body in the context of artistic endeavor. Further, the muscularity of my husband’s body offers the opportunity to render musculature which is not often visible in other models’ bodies. However, my husband, whose only experience with public nudity was his time in the Navy when he was obliged to shower with other sailors and there were strict although unspoken rules as to how one should look at other naked men, was uncomfortable with the task. Thus we came to the issue of dress and undress and as to what power relationships were established by one person being undressed while the other was undressed, when one person dressed commands another person undressed, when one person dressed looks at another person undressed, and moreover when it is a woman dressed who looks at a man undressed. In the spirit of connubial bliss, we resolved the issue by my removing all my clothes to draw him while he posed naked. After this first time, he was not disturbed by posing naked because we had established a rapport regarding the situation; however, the questions that arose during that session have made me extremely aware of the relationship between the artist and the model and sensitive to the needs of the model.. 11.. Standing Male Figure with Wooden Sword. This is a painting of my husband, Jeff, clothed and holding a wooden sword. I wanted to do a painting of a man holding a sword over his shoulder, with a pose and attitude reminiscent of the brawling young bravos who populate Renaissance stories. 30.

(31) such as the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini. However, this proved to be a very difficult painting in all aspects. First of all, Jeff stood for a total of approximately twelve hours over the course of four days. He was entirely on his own, with no stool or wall to lean against. Then, he had one hand hooked in his belt and one hand extended out. Both hands, naturally, went to sleep and were painful.. The next problem I faced was the odd perspective of his body. Since I was standing next to him, and I am the same height as him, I found that his head and torso appeared disproportionately large while his legs and feet tapered off to become unreasonably small. I was forced to restart this painting three times before I finally settled on the composition.. The painting bears the record of the effort that Jeff put into modeling and the brush strokes are record of my sense of frustration and need to work quickly.. 12.. Beth Snowberger. Beth Snowberger is a friend of mine from the United States who came to Taiwan to study martial arts. She graciously agreed to sit for me and did so, with great patience and without a single complaint, for three long days. It so happened that these three days included the September 11 World Trade Center Massacre, and so the occasion of having her portrait painted also afforded an excuse to remain in each other’s company at a very frightening time. A small portion of the shock of that day crept into the painting, especially in her eyes, but I later consciously removed this. 31.

(32) aspect because I did not wish to grant the terrorists even the tiny victory of having scared my friend and me.. Beth and I have been slowly developing a deep friendship over the past five years. She impresses me as being very much an East Coaster, slow and cautious going into a friendship, but once in, true and loyal to the end. Certain aspects of her background are amusingly close to mine, especially in that her family and my mother’s family both come from the same part of Pennsylvania and thus we have a memory of and a taste for the same rich foods. Beth also is a film expert and is currently embarking on experiments in making her own films; I admire this expertise and courage and she has taught me a great deal about imagery and how the eye perceives things in film.. In this painting of Beth, I was faced with several challenges. First, I wanted to capture the delicate color of her skin against a white wall. Her skin proved not so difficult because her skin mid-tone happens to perfectly match the Old Holland flesh color. I was also determined to use the blue undertone of the veins beneath the surface of her skin. The wall behind her was more difficult in that it was flat, white and monotone in life which does not translate well into a painting. The perspective of the staircase also took some work to resolve. It became clear that the variation in tones of the grays and yellows of the staircase were what led my eye to believe that there was a three-dimensional space there and so I attempted to catch the variations. Finally, there was the question of the very strong diagonal rhythm of the painting, set up by the staircase and mimicked by the human figure thereon.. 32.

(33) 13.. Asha Chen. Asha Chen is a classmate of mine and is one of the reasons I have been able to survive the graduate program in painting at Shi Da. She has shown endless patience in explaining things to me in easy-to-understand Chinese. I am intrigued by her relentless creativity. Asha is, like most art majors, an art teacher and teaches young children in various afterschool programs. She is also the co-author, designer and artist for her own line of comic books, which she promotes at comic book conventions and special events while dressed up as her favorite character. This is no small task and involves elaborate costumes that must be custom made, either by her and her comic book cohort or professional tailors. Even in the midst of a group of artists, all of whom are more independent and daring than the average person, she stands out as unusually brave.. In painting Asha, I wanted to refer to her comic book alter ego. I started the painting as a charcoal sketch on a panel and then built the painting up over the sketch with oil and wax medium, with attention to preserving the character of the sketch. I wanted the painting to slide back and forth between a concrete painting and a sketch of a fantasy character. The sketch has therefore survived in the finished painting.. CONCLUSION. The works painted for my senior show represent the things I find important in my life: art, science, and friendship. I love science and discovery, yet I find its exactitude too demanding. I love art, but often find it too amorphous to satisfy my. 33.

(34) intellect. I have therefore attempted to combine the two. My friends make life possible and meaningful; without them, I would not wish to paint.. 34.

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