I chose this chapter by its title because I identified with it. When I got into the subject matter, I felt that I identified with it further--I don't think there are many women who wouldn't. Beecroft creates an interesting paradox of both perpetuating and yet emphasising in a critical way the pressure on women to attempt to sculpt themselves to fit the ideals of beauty.
I can understand why there are so many contradictions between who Beecroft is and what the work she makes is saying, and why there are so many contradictions within her work itself. The same explanation may go for why, although she is tall, slender, stylish, and beautiful, she chooses not to model for her own works. We can never achieve the standards set out for us because they are the results of unnatural and sometimes unattainable processes, and we get frustrated with these standards because we are aware that we can never achieve them, that they will always be unrealistic and set way too high. But that doesn't mean we don't make any effort to try to resemble them. Even though she may be a picture of beauty by many other peoples' standards, maybe Beecroft has this same struggle (this is hinted at by the mention in the chapter of her bout of anorexia).
These are things that I think are constantly on any young woman's mind, and I admit they have been on my mind too- that maybe I should always put make-up on in the mornings, that I should wash and brush my hair every day, that I should work out to lose inches and appear slimmer, that I should spend more money on clothes, that I should always have my fingernails nicely painted, that I should sit like a lady, that I should smile to appear beautiful, that I attempt to do all these things and still don't seem to get recognised for any of them because I still don't reach the set standard.
I thought about this briefly when sketching out my painting for this week, too. Having had some proportional issues with my original image composite also gave me an opportunity to rethink the figure's conformity to standards. If body image, perfection, and media standards is an issue I struggle with, shouldn't that be part of the painting, even though the painting isn't about that? I have difficulty drawing the figure proportionately without a reference, and so I searched for stock models in the pose I wanted. I couldn't find the exact pose, so I took parts of it from other images and tried to create a frankenstein reference, but proportion isn't always preserved when trying to draw this way. Even if I had gotten the composite right though, it's made from models who are all very slender. So, the figure is slender. A friend brought to my attention how skinny the figure actually is when I asked if she wouldn't mind modelling for me quickly so that I could resolve the proportional issues. "I'm not as skinny as the lady in your painting," she told me. And I said, "nobody's as skinny as the lady in my painting. I kind of want to change that." She's right. I want my figure to appear elegant, as I would like to appear, and I often think that in order to be most elegant, the figure has to be slender. In many cases, very slender women are very elegant. This says nothing about slender women, but shouldn't a less slender woman be able to be elegant too?
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