On my first day of my freshman year, I entered the disheveled art building at the University of Minnesota and encountered a round bench filled with emaciated art students staring back at me. The boys had hair in their eyes and were surrounded by skateboards, cans of spray paint, and bags of loose tobacco. The girls wore homemade dresses constructed of hemp and vintage baby doll dresses. Or at least that’s how I remember it.

I offered them my biggest smile, the one that had helped me earn a slot on the Lincoln High School homecoming court. When that was met with scorn and disinterest, I sat down on the bench across the room and wondered what was it about me that turned them off. Was it my massive dyed blond hair? The mall outfit? I hadn’t said a word yet, so it couldn’t have been my vocal fry. Those art students were obviously defiant rulebreakers, capable of both fashion extremes and criminal activities, whereas I was the poster child for mainstream. I assumed that their boldness and deviance resulted in profound art. Which meant, I realized, that a scared, vacuous girl like me would only create timid and insipid work. My first year of college I was usually on my own in the art building. If art parties were happening, I wasn’t invited. No matter; with my friends from the dorm, I took advantage of the rotating parties in the Greek system, where any girl could score free beer if she was willing to put up with beer goggle jokes and playlists full of Meatloaf ballads.

My isolation in the art building is why it was so remarkable when Brett Balzac asked me to meet for coffee. Not only was Brett one of the moodiest of the art students, he was a good four years older than the rest of us. His standing as a true artist had been cemented when our Introduction to Drawing teacher asked us to draw something on our body and, while the rest of us bashfully removed our shoes and socks and began drawing our toes, Brett headed to the men’s bathroom, stripped down, and drew his naked torso in the bathroom mirror. Getting asked to coffee by Brett had the potential to be a real game changer.

That Saturday I ventured into Dinkytown, the Bohemian heart of the university where Bob Dylan hung out in the 1960s and where 1990s university girls without bras and boys without deodorant congregated to be pretentious as a group. Brett strolled into Espresso Royale. He had long, black hair and weighed a good forty pounds below what was medically advisable. We got our coffees and sat down, my mind whirling with the possibility of how Bohemian I could become with this new friend. I would soon write poetry and refuse to go home for politically incorrect holidays.

Brett wasted no time in letting me know why he had actually asked me to meet him.

“Would you like to pose nude for me?” he asked in his fake French accent.

Brett Balzac didn’t think I had the potential to be interesting; he thought my breasts had the potential to be interesting and wanted to judge for himself. I wanted a friend in art school, but not that bad. I refused his offer with the apologetic mania that only an eighteen-year-old girl from the Midwest in 1989, or Diane Keaton, could muster.

“Oh wow! Thanks, but I guess not? Sorry! That is so nice of you to want to paint me and everything, but I better not.”

Sitting anywhere in the broad daylight without my clothes on was not going to happen, and Brett didn’t seem to want to hang out with me fully clothed, so we never did become friends. But I thought a lot about his desire to paint me, a woman, nude. What is with men always wanting to paint naked women when they could paint a naked man, a dog, or a bunch of grapes?

Maybe it all started with whoever painted all those frescoes of naked women in Pompeii—probably a man. There are naked women all over Eastern and Western antiquity. There are about a hundred painted versions of the very naked Susanna from the Bible. Manet dropped a very
casually naked model into a bunch of fully suited men in his Luncheon on the Grass.

Pierre Bonnard got famous painting naked women, usually in their baths or drying off after taking a bath. Look at too much art history, most of it painted by men, and you would think that all women walk the planet totally naked, or are just about to be naked, or that we never leave the bath.

In college, I sought out female painters to see how they approached the human body, but there were not many women featured in our art history books, and even fewer of those women were painting the human figure. Eventually, I found three painters to inspire my figure work: Susan Rothenberg, Faith Ringgold, and Alice Neel.

Rothenberg first became famous for painting horses, but it was the human bodies she painted, cut apart and dismembered, with a decapitated head floating here, a forearm hovering there, that impacted me. She painted emotionally raw paintings with energetic marks, the kind I wanted to make.

Ringgold is most famous for her textile art, but the first time I saw her painting Die, a massive mural depicting blood and violence and the struggle related to race relations in America in 1967, it shifted many things for me. It was proof that a woman could paint a massive, difficult-to-look-at artwork about a massive thing like violence just as well as Picasso did. Her human figures were flat, their shadows removed, and in various stages of flight or fight. Ringgold’s work made me want to become a better technical artist so I could produce a work as complicated and perfect and epic someday.

Neel’s subjects were usually clothed, and that clothing offered clues about her subject’s life, state of mind, and place in society. Neel did a painting of herself nude at eighty years old, paintbrush in hand, the sagging, redistributed body of an old woman sinking into a striped chair.
She later said her flushed cheeks in the self-portrait were proof that making that painting had not been easy on her.

And even more contemporary female painters have subverted traditional figure painting further by painting looming, bold, fat, emaciated women clearly made of actual female flesh. Paula Rego’s highly stylized and often costumed women have a punk attitude and aggressive stances you don’t normally see depicted in a painting of a lady. The British artist Tracey Emin lined her figures with jagged, charged lines. I walked into a Chelsea gallery years ago to be knocked flat by one of Jenny Saville’s canvases on the wall. The painting was nothing but pale skin and ruddy flesh, darker in some parts, rashy in others, the figure jammed into the four corners of the canvas like Alice in Wonderland growing larger. Saville had painted the woman from a very low perspective, which made her large breasts and thighs look even more substantial. Saville took the very things women are supposed to hate about our bodies—curves and flesh—and highlighted them as the things that make us remarkable.

PAINTING THE FIGURE

PERSPECTIVE:

PAINTING THE FIGURE