Stupid Cupid keeps on calling me.* I’m a sucker for a clichéd romantic tale, how they met (me), how they hate now. Wings and lungs, snakes and sperm, smoking and death, colons and openings. A number refers to a passage from Wolf Among Wolves by Hans Fallada describing a mouth that looks as though it ‘has tasted every bitterness’, but really it’s just shapes.
The edge, the gateway: the audibility of woman’s pleasure in her fluffy yellow knickers. The joy of performance quickly becomes the trap of performance, the show and the mask are both liberating and yet come to be a rigid externally imposed role. Unless it is a mask of your own making, an alternate self that is simultaneously opposite and unilaterally true. An autofiction of multiple selves.
An internal voice joins in the spiteful hate towards women, towards myself. I want to paint a nude like Courbet, a dancer like Toulouse Lautrec. I’ve bound up my mother’s body here, covered it in fur and thrown it into space. The explosion is a nuclear bomb, the blast left faces lit up in immortal smiles*. I really like painting the female body, I can’t help it.
International travel and glamorous love affairs with men old enough to be your father; the problematic reality of heterosexual attraction formed in a patriarchal world. But it’s so fun though isn’t it? The sexy 70s and our current body-positive shame free (female) sexual liberty come with exploitation, murder and abuse. I still want to be Jane Birkin on Histoire de Melody Nelson*.
A realisation of the sexiness of the hoof. Myself as a pot-bellied female faun pursuing carnal desire. But polite and self-censored. A parody of my own previous paintings creating a confused reality between dream, longing and memory abstracted from real place and time.
*Fast Love - George Michael
*Kim’s Sunsets - Fat White Family
*Serge Gainsbourg 1971