A couple of weeks ago my attention was drawn to the first time I posted my painting of Fleabag, the character created by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, on Instagram. Now I usually spend a a bit of time each morning composing something to accompany my daily Instagram post. I often even get my wife to have a look at it before I post to make sure I haven’t written something that is unclear–she’s a helluvan editor. However, In the case of the Fleabag post, I feel like I probably didn’t do that.
Sometimes writers can be guilty of writing from the point of view that the reader is looking at their work almost through the same lens. It’s as they they have assumed the reader has the same experiences and knowledge and they know exactly where the writer is coming from. Or in the case of this post, I think what I did was to write it as though whoever was reading it had also read a particular post on this here blog here. Here’s what I wrote in the aforementioned Instagram post: “Last week in my blog I mentioned that it seems to me that I don’t paint enough women and I made reference to Picasso’s famous misogyny and how he mistreated his “muses”, so maybe that made it okay? Anyway, I knew that it doesn’t make it okay, so a few days later I started on this painting of Fleabag the character made famous by Phoebe Waller-Bridge first as a one-woman stage play and then as a TV series.”
What the hell do I mean by “…so maybe that made it okay”? When I re-read that the other week, I wasn’t even sure at first. It didn’t take me long to figure it out, but dammit it wasn’t clear. What I meant was, maybe the fact that Picasso regularly painted his muses from the perspective of a misogynist makes it okay that the majority of the subjects I paint are men. To be even more clear I was suggesting that maybe it’s actually better to paint men in this style since the Picasso influence brings with it a fair amount of his baggage whether I like it or not. And believe me, I don’t like it. But it is what it is.
In the last part of that post I was definitely suggesting that maybe I was just using Picasso’s baggage as an excuse to paint more men. Of course I’ve also talked about the fact that in our culture men are much more likely to be the main characters of any given story, be it film, television, novels, etc. I mean, I did five paintings of the characters from the Trailer Park Boys last year that have gone over quite well, but it’s notable that I didn’t paint Lucy because she’s just not the focus of the show! I won’t write about the Bechdel Test again, but if you’re not familiar with it, you might want to read this. Trailer Park Boys are just one example of this kind of male dominance, but in spite of this there are obviously many many iconic women characters I could paint. So in that Instagram post I asked if there were any that people would like to see. It wasn’t that I couldn’t think of any, I just wanted to know if there were any in particular that my followers wanted to see.
To make a short story long, I don’t think I got a lot of responses that day, but someone gave me quite a few suggestions the week before last. One was to do a portrait of Gilda Radner, so I decided to go ahead and do that! My wife and I had just watched the documentary Love Gilda that weekend, so it was in the back of my mind anyway. As you can see I mashed up two of her iconic characters. And I also have another female character that I’ll post on Thursday.