Women in Mirrors

As I work away on this new series I started to do some searching on the tradition of artists addressing the subject of the female form and mirrors. While all of my new series doesn’t necessarily involve mirrors or reflection, the current painting I am working on does— and I notice myself more and more drawn to this idea of using the mirror as an allegory as well as a great tool for achieving interesting visual effects. At the start of this series it was important for me to always use at least 2 figures, as the interaction between the figures and the space was essential to the paintings. Riding the tension between positive and negative space in a painting, and utilizing the shapes that each create, has been a focus in my work for quite a while. Well, the obvious way around using 2 different figures was to use a mirror— thereby using the figure and the figure reflected.

This progression of the figures to the figure reflected has provided rich ground for some of these paintings. It adds a stunning visual complexity as well as lending itself to metaphorical interpretations and allegory. What is reflected/what isn’t? Appearance/reality. What we see/what we don’t see. How we look. How we look.

So, as the paintings progress, my interest in how other artists have addressed women in mirrors has increased. The works above are as follows:

• Roy Lichtenstein, Girl in Mirror, 1964
• Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Woman before a Mirror, 1897
• Pierre BONNARD Woman in front of a mirror, c. 1908
• Pablo Picasso, Girl before A Mirror, 1932
• Roy Lichtenstein, Nude in Mirror, 1994

An interesting piece of trivia on the Lichtenstein “Nude in Mirror” above: In 2005, “a visitor to an art museum in western Austria pulled a pocket knife from her purse and repeatedly slashed a painting by U.S. pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, a police spokesman said Sunday.
The woman, a 35-year-old German from Munich, was visiting the Kunsthaus Bregenz exhibition "Roy Lichtenstein Classic of the New" on Saturday afternoon when she slashed the painting "Nude in Mirror," police spokesman Thomas Prodinger said. She made four cuts, each measuring almost 12 inches, Prodinger said.” (quoted text from http://entertainment.tv.yahoo.com/news/ap/20050904/112587474000p.html)