Irving Penn Found Similar Inspiration

I have found a lot of inspiration in early artists' representations of the female figure such as with the Venus of Willendorf and other goddess figurines. I know I am not the only one.

This is a pair photographs from the February 2002 issue of Art News. In an article by Maria Morris Hambourg, then head of the photography department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she writes about a series of photographs Irving Penn took in the late 1940s.

At the time, Penn was a fashion photographer for Vogue magazine when he became tired of the painted and primped skinny girls.

One day in the winter of 1947, Irving Penn, a promising young photographer, walked away from a dressing room full of slender, beautiful models and boarded a plane for Haiti. He was not unhappy with his job at Vogue, but he felt the need for some "real women in real circumstances", as opposed to those
"skinny girls with self-starved looks". Setting aside the concerns of fashion, for a couple of days Penn roamed about the docks and mixed with the people of Port au Prince until his natural vitality had been restored and he felt reconnected with his essential self. Evidently the Caribbean worked,for within a few short months of his return, he had created several disconcerting and novel still lives, had met the love of his life, and had begun his most important personal work, a series of photographs of female nudes.

These nudes which are the subject of the exhibition
"Earthly Bodies". Irving Penn's Nudes '49 to '50 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, began with a single extraordinary photograph that Penn made in May 1947, not long after his trip to Haiti. [...] Following his impulses, he hired a heavy-set model who was willing to pose nude and photographed her in a truncated corner flat he had built [...] that served to focus his subject and limit the arena of the picture.

Resting her bulk on a cube shaped block, her arms tucked behind her back, the woman is a compact mass. The rounded forms of her breasts, belly and thighs,laved in soft light, have such lithic weight and texture that she becomes an archaic fertility goddess existing outside time. The photograph Nude No. 1 so strongly resembles the famous Venus of Willendorf that Penn presumes that he had
been struck by that image.

Yet he was not consciously reverting to a primitive form but was reaching for forms that carried a positive charge for him and responded to his plastic needs as an artist. Whether he had seen a reproduction of the statuette or not, he was in touch with the same instinct that called forth that Venus from her Neolithic sculptor - the recognition of the mysterious, procreative power of the female body that has symbolized creativity since the dawn of art. The urge to embody the Earth's fertility, human conception, or any creative aspiration in the form of the female nude is as basic as the artist's urge to take up pen or brush.

In the fullness of their bodies, the Willendorf Venus and Nude No. 1 are original sites of art and to create them is to embrace life at its fullest, deepest, and most generative.

I found this article very moving and inspiring. As Irving Penn took a lot of flak for his subject choice from the arbiters of style at the time, so too have I taken some as well.
I think we share a similar sense of risk in the images we create. for it is easier to criticise than to visualise.

Hambourg says in her conclusion:

Those who value creativity more than style, and imagination more than titillation, probably will have little difficulty with these nudes; however, some will find these images and the women they represent not beautiful. They are not alone. [snip] If we suspend our judgement and give in to pleasure we cannot control we may discover a gratifying expansion of our selves as we follow these women through their progression in the evolving series. We may be surprised to find we are greatly moved and what moves us is the undeniable beauty of these bodies expressed through Penn's prodigious art which recognized it and brought it forth.

You can read the article online. Something I didn't check until after I transcribed the quotes!

Some old and new work

Here is a painting I did for a client. The client wanted a mermaid to add to his collection of mermaids. I thought about it for a while and realized that I had never seen a black mermaid, so I decided to make one. And then, when I thought about how a mermaid would need to function in the water, I decided she couldn't be skinny.

The title of this work is "Catch and Release". I like the way it is up to the viewer to decide if the mermaid is just caught or is being let go. What do you think?



My client loved the painting and it now lives on Nantucket Island. The painting is about 48"x30".

This next work is called "Andromeda". What interests me in this work is the question of Andromeda's captivity. Is she free or chained?

I like the dichotomy of the the weight of the figure and the rock contrasting with the flitting butterflies. The positioning of the butterflies was inspired by the constellation Cetus. This painting is approximately 48"x40".