Sherry Haber

Date of Award

2012

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Anderson, Kim

Keywords

Portraiture, Figurative Painting, Visual Culture

Area of Concentration

Art

Abstract

Portrait painting has been historically situated in allegory for social and political indications of class, status, and power. The clothing and adornments of painted subjects and the location in which they were situated spoke more concretely about how subjects presented themselves in a social space than of their true nature. By stripping the subject and alleviating her of these aspects of self-fashioning, she is able to communicate through her own form. Through painting head-and-bust portraits of nude women against flat backgrounds, I reflect on issues of femininity, intimacy, vulnerability, sexuality and the cultural commodification of desire. Situated in the work of Jacques Lacan concerning desire and "the gaze" and the ideas of Richard Brilliant on self-representation in portraiture, my portraits explore how we look at and interact with images of the female body in visual culture.

Rights

This bibliographic record is available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication. The New College of Florida, as creator of this bibliographic record, has waived all rights to it worldwide under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights, to the extent allowed by law.

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