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anointing (orange) Painting
United Kingdom
Painting, Acrylic on Canvas
Size: 59.1 W x 59.1 H x 2 D in
About The Artwork
anointing (orange) depicts two women in a liminal moment, as one ritualisticly and tenderly applies bright orange pigment to the other's body. There is a suggestion of the forest as a backdrop, but the unnatural colour palette suggests an unreality or heightened experience for the women. I used a combination of lifedrawing and photographs to work from. The models are friends. The session was performative, working collaboratively with them to find narratives and poses. I have an ongoing fascination with ritual behaviour from all human cultures. In my work I often return to anthropology, psychology and the study of humans as just another animal. I have been raised by scientists, I am athiest, and my recent practice explores a longing for meaningful, symbolic actions; rites of passage and initiation, ceremony, and a sense of the sacred. This painting shows an ambiguous moment during a ritual, where pigment is applied as an agent of transformation. I am always concerned with picking apart the social norm, particularly in relation to gender and sexuality, highlighting and criticising accepted social behaviour. I wanted the women in this painting to be autonomous, at ease with their bodies, and more involved with a powerful, personal experience than with their appearance. My meticulous treatment of the subject is a kind of reverence, I used the detail, time-hungry technique and ambiguity to deepen the emotional impact. I'm striving to make frank images and to communicate very directly and intimately. Kirsty Whiten 2018
Details & Dimensions
Painting:Acrylic on Canvas
Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork
Size:59.1 W x 59.1 H x 2 D in
Frame:Not Framed
Ready to Hang:No
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United Kingdom
Based in Fife, Scotland, Kirsty Whiten’s portraits of the ‘imagined anthropological’ recall the writing of Pliny, the mythological figures summoned up by Homer, the psychoanalytic Wolfman, and the moralist paintings of Hieronymous Bosch. In her own words, Whiten makes ‘frank images of people, dealing with their psychology and socially constructed behaviour; making the viewer aware of the sexuality, control and neuroses underneath appearance [...] I aim to discomfort the viewer by presenting a character very directly and intimately’. These are paintings that, unlike Bosch, are secular prostrations of the human animal: savage, but by no means noble, civilised but only inasmuch as it is able to repress it’s instinct. In short, Whiten’s work unspools the surreality of human self-image. In her series Sexyland, the artist makes the genteel brocading of the 19th century stately home co-habit the much more beastly act of masturbation. The series is a kind of visual homage to the first chapter of Michel Foucault’s seminal text The History of Sexuality, titled ‘We Other Victorians’, and, like that text, is akin to hearing a deeply repressed secret loudly broadcast on national television. These recurring clashes are perhaps partly to explain why, as admitted in a recent interview with The Scotsman, Whiten is ‘often unsure where she fits in’. And perhaps the liminality her works remind us of (or, better, that they revel in reminding us of, however much we might squirm), the narrow gulf between a tableau of morals, cultures, practices that have qualified and excepted the human vs. their presumed absence in the kingdom of beasts, ought make us equally unsure of where it is we ourselves ‘fit in’.
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