The Currency of Beauty
Paintings of beautiful young women are nothing new. Men have been painting alluring women in the bloom of youth for as long as there has been canvas and brushes. But, what’s unique about Lizzie Wortham’s paintings of young women (most who were born female), is that the subjects composed the compositions themselves.
Wortham’s recent work focuses on representations of young women on the path to discovering their own identities. And for this exhibition, Wortham respectfully asked young women within her children’s circle of friends to allow her to use their selfies as source material. A recent American poll found that young women, age 16 to 25, who engage in selfies spend an average of five hours a week to this end.
Between styling clothes, applying make-up, dressing hair, shooting, retouching, distributing on social media and receiving feedback, this can be a time-consuming affair. And many parents, rightly so, are concerned that young women who participate in selfie culture are investing too much of their identities into their appearance. Certainly, aligning one’s self-worth with reactions to one’s selfies can create a whole host of troubling issues. And, Wortham, as an artist and a mother, is obviously concerned as well.
Regarding the works in the show, gallery director, Erica Rasmussen has said, “I find Wortham’s work to be engaging on numerous levels. Formally, her paintings are chic, active and strong. Executed realistically in places and abstractly in others, her portraits break the rules of pictorial conventions. The combination of various application techniques, such as washes, board brushstrokes, dips and impasto magically congeal into captivating images. Conceptually, her paintings question western standards of beauty, binary stereotypes and self-perception in the digital age. Her paintings ask us to consider whether these images simply address a young woman’s sense of vanity, or whether the young women portrayed are agents of change. Perhaps the answer is a little bit of both. In any case, I applaud these young women for rejecting the male-gaze and proactively crafting their own self-images.”