Proposal – Helen
by helen608
My initial inspiration arouse from the females featured in Pre Raphaelite paintings. These women dominate nearly every image, their faces and figures becoming the centre piece, far outshining any other detail within the frame. The Pre Raphaelites, famed for the passion and beauty in their work, did not only recognise their subjects from the two dimensional presence on their easel, in most cases they had a strong physical relationship with them. Lovers became wives, and still new lovers came along. The Pre Raphaelite Brotherhood had formed under the ideal of bringing a moral seriousness to art that had never before been seen. Most of the time they based their paintings on poems or biblical and medieval stories.
Thus the women who were so important in their lives often appeared in their artwork under the guise of characters. I want to explore the way in which women are depicted in such paintings – the artist holds the brush and is thus in control of how to make her appear. I will look at the comparisons between the images that are direct portraits of the women and the ones in which they act as characters, in the latter there must surely be a suppression of sorts as she is being seen in the appearance of another, her own spirit and personality are masked.
Ultimately I will be exploring the spirit of a woman, and how it is depicted under a male perspective.
As of yet my proposal is quite a broad idea, but I know I want to do something with the idea of controlling how women are seen in imagery, through producing a series of portraits. I am also considering using text within this project. An idea was to use lines from old poems and stories in which a man is given a particularly flattering description and display the text with my image so it appears to be describing the woman in the portrait. This is so as to manipulate the viewers evaluation of the figure, to let them believe the woman is everything the text tells them when in actuality her own existence is trapped beneath these words that ultimately belong to men.
Another idea is to experiment with physically inserting this text into the image itself, perhaps printing on different materials and attempting to sew it in. The closeness of the sentences to the women will serve to emphasise their binding nature, chaining her to their words.
I am also researching the idea of the femme fatale which is quite interesting to me, having risen late in the 1800’s it saw the progression of women in art and literature from appearing only as a meek and subservient characters to being powerful and dangerous. Women were given their own voice, but this was again largely a voice dictated through men.
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