The Anatomy Lesson Documents

I'm starting a blog! As a documentation of my studio work and of materials that are at the basis of my practice. I'm jumping right in, following John Cage's 'start anywhere'. Since January 2020 I've been working, painting and sculpting on a feminist body of work 'The Anatomy Lesson,' the progress of which I've been documenting on social media. But I wanted a more extensive record, of the inspiration, the sources, the research.  I can't go back in time, but I'll start here and now, today, at the point where I'm at with the project. The complete project up until now can be viewed here in a viewing room I made especially for it. In this blog though I want to write more about my thoughts behind it, where I get the inspiration from, the images, how it fits into a story of feminist artists working on the core images, the body. I hope you'll enjoy it. 

Returning to my kaleidoscopic monochromatic paintings, 2 mirrored panels of the diptych for 'The Anatomy Lesson,' body of work, addressing the way women's bodies were/are approached in art and science. I want to mirror the first panel, and I'm hesitant to start without much plotting of the figure. Sometimes my artistic enthousiasm gets in the way when working on something that needs careful prepping. So I decided to use a more effective way, than the cutout I used earlier, to position the 'figures' in the mirrored painting more precisely: tracing paper! As it turns out I'm not the only (woman) artist using a kaleidoscopic effect to create a body-related work, swipe left to see Carolee Schneemann's work, Parallel Axis. The work attempts to find new ways of viewing the (female) body by placing it within a landscape as an integral part of the visual field. Schneeman's performance-based work was primarily characterized by research into visual traditions, taboos, and the body of the individual in relation to social bodies. Again, big steps to follow into~