Black Dress, Silk Stockings
What first appear as lightly comic, slightly fey portraits of women in intimate, natural, unstuffy environments - the bedroom, the boudoir, the forest - soon offer up a playful coquettishness, a scarcely-hidden licentiousness.
With her angular features and wide, saucer-like eyes - not to mention the bare, attenuated trees around her - ‘The girl of Constant Sorrow' looks innocent, otherworldly, like an illustration for a collection of children's folk tales. And yet there's clearly a lustier, more sensuous subtext, as witness her pink cheeks and shining skin. She wears a wedding ring, clutches a crucifix and seems to hold her hands demurely against her chest. Look again, though, and you see that this gesture is anything but modest - that in fact her breasts are left in clear view, bathed in some sympathetic light source from stage right. A bra-strap hangs down - is she coming from or going to an assignation? How do the crucifix and wedding ring sit with these strong hints of licentiousness? And what of the forest itself, traditionally a place of fairytale misdeeds, of darkness, sorcery and unsettling adventure? What is she looking at, out there just beyond us the viewer? These are the little conundrums with which the painting invites us into its strange, teasing world.
Such visual clues are common throughout these playful, intimate scenes. Many of the paintings have very plain, stylised backgrounds, offering these women absolute centre stage. Light coming into the paintings falls here on a breast, there on a flash of cheek or chin. An invitation to sensual pleasure is everywhere, but it is far from brazen - rather it is subtle, tentative, not quite sure of itself - and all the more alluring for that.
These paintings are at once a puzzle and an invitation. They are not quite as they appear - but the reward for engaging with the puzzle promises something playful and sensuous. They are suggestions and invitations rather than statements, and are all the more beguiling for that.
Steve Wright
Art Editor, Venue Magazine
