Career Girls

I have continued to be excited and drawn to beautiful women that often appear in advertising. Part of this excitement came out of my desire for gender transformation through make up and dress which formed the character Dawn.

The images I chose to work from had some kind of absent gaze, as if something in them or their situation was unresolved, incorporating a sense of longing combined, with a strength to survive. It was important that I could engage with the image through the act of painting. I was not interested in the context or situation that the model was placed in by the photographer.

Once I had completed a number of these images I began to feel something was lacking. The images at this stage were painted on a white background. I started to look at these images for some time and begun to think about their lives. Where did they live, what did they do for a job? How were they surviving? For me this was a breakthrough as I started to search and paint images that would help locate these career girls, as I refer to them. It began to open up a doorway into developing a narrative that I could enter into like a piece of fictional writing.

Finally I started to use quotations that I found in fashion magazines and develop these as titles for the work which added to the sense narrative.