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• 1 media/Lupe.jpg media/Oizyscrop.jpg 2021-04-23T17:51:52+00:00 Olivia Collins 8 image_header 2021-04-28T22:05:01+00:00 My work throughout my undergraduate experience has changed with each year but many aspects have remained the same. I make art about being a woman and I prefer to make work with an emphasis on skill and technique. Even though we are introduced to many new mediums, I mainly work in oil paints as I feel it is the best medium for a tedious process. The exception to this is installation work that features fabric and sewing techniques. 
  
  I found myself basing paintings from my own images. This started at a last resort as I mostly paint people and need a reference photo. All my paintings of women tend to look like me and I was always reluctant to accept this in my work. I recently decided to embrace that I use myself as a reference and have started considering my work as self portraits. Self portraits as a woman artist will always be considered a political statement due to the fact that women have historically been the subject and sexualized in paintings created by men. I am hoping that with paintings of myself I eliminate the idea of the male gaze completely as I am creating imagery of my own body and face. There is a long history of women artists creating their own portraits as a way to place themselves in art history. 
  
  More recently I have been inspired by horror films from the 1960s and 1970s. The visuals of a lot of Italian director Dario Agento’s films have been a starting point for a lot of my newer ideas. The overly theatrical settings and manipulation of light are aspects I utilized for my senior show. Female hysteria has been a subject for many male artists since the phrase was popularized in the Victorian era. Men have described women showing any emotion or distraughtness as hysteria when this one word does not capture any feelings. Horror, more than any genre of films, focuses on female hysteria since the majority of the women in these films are used to be dramatic vessels. The women characters are often seen overreacting and/or the victims of murders and other horrible acts. I am interested in depicting women showing emotions to break the stigma that showing any emotions is a weakness since it is attributed to being a feminine. 
  
  For my senior show, I created four oil painted self portraits based on reference images of me showing emotions that have traditionally been titled by society as feminine emotions. It is important to me that these pieces are paintings because of the long history that women were always just the subject of paintings and I am eliminating this power dynamic as I am both the artist and the subject. These pieces will include imagery of crying, screaming, fainting, and the idea of sexuality. These types of emotions were originally inspired by emotions labelled as hysteria in the Victorian period, however, they were also chosen for their relevance to my life and as feelings that are viewed as lesser than by a male dominated world. In each painting, I am wearing a long pink dress that always appears slightly different due to the lighting in each piece. I appear overly feminine, where the paintings show me with makeup on and my long hair present as this is an accurate portrayal of myself. I want to use these emotions to stereotype myself and my own emotions which is why I will only use myself as the subject rather than have other women be the reference. The portraits are meant to be a sincere representation of myself utilizing hyperbolic aspects of lighting and overall emotion. By having these exaggerated portraits of myself I am showing that I experience all of these frowned upon traits and that I am accepting my feminine traits. These portraits will be a representation of all things feminine that have defined my life but have been disregarded by society as not important and frivolous. 
  
  There are four pieces in this series and their names derive from Greek Mythology. The paintings are named from the Daughters of Algea who were personifications of pain, grief, and distress. These names work for these paintings because these goddesses represent emotions that are categorized as feminine. The first piece in the series, Lupe, represents the idea in Victorian hysteria of women fainting. Although the inspiration was fainting, it also has the meaning of oversleeping as it is a self portrait and I am seen laying on my own bed. The next painting, Oizys, showcases sadness and crying. This emotion was chosen since crying is seen as a weak aspect of human beings and is associated with women. The third piece is titled Achus and represents anxiety and frustration and shows a representation of how I handle these emotions. The last piece in the series of paintings is titled Ania. This piece represents sexuality and I was inspired by Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus. 
  
  I decided that these four paintings needed to be framed with gold frames. I created these frames with wood and gold paint to create the illusion of gold frames. These frames are supposed to give a nice contrast from the unrealistic colors within each piece. The frames are also meant to be symbolic of the history of painting and fine art overall. With the gold frames, my paintings appear as “official” pieces and depict that me, a woman artist, created the highest form of art that needed gold frames. It also symbolizes that female emotion is the highest art form.