Textual Poaching

Source image: 

"Poached" image: 

 Artist/teacher Statement:

I'm a very pale white woman. In popular art, this gender/race combination are usually portrayed as flawless images of beauty. We still do this today in our art, especially art used to advertise: flawlessness is a great motivator to spend money and inflict unhappiness on oneself. In my particular case, I've always been especially aware of the perfect skin in paintings, such as the glowing ivory tones of The Girl with the Pearl Earring. From my childhood I've suffered from cystic acne, and as a result have been a bit of a lab rat for different acne medications, having visited dermatologists regularly from age 12. In my poached image, I attempted to recreate the same image of the painting and added in (on my face) the medications (or at least some of them) I have taken and (on my hair) the side effects caused by those medications. While I initially felt isolated from this painting and its historical moment by recalling my struggle to meet society's standard of beauty, I realized more and more that women have always been laden with unrealistic expectations of beauty. The woman in this portrait doesn't look happy at all--maybe she had her own side effects of beauty. I think that this exercise would be useful in the classroom to help students stop feeling distanced by space and time from characters in novels or plays, or even the authors of those works: the human experience is shared and similar. This assignment helped me to feel understood and connected to the woman in the painting, as well as other women throughout history.