The Eternal Feminine by Katelyn Eichwald

Paul Cézanne, The Eternal Feminine, 1877.Oil on canvas. 17 x 20 7/8 in.  (Credit: J. Paul Getty Museum)

In Paul Cézanne's The Eternal Feminine, men from different occupations (musicians, painters, a bishop) surround a female nude. Although The Eternal Feminine relates to much of Katelyn Eichwald's work, where women are painted in vulnerable situations and/or as a mere object to the male mythology, Eichwald appropriated Paul Cézanne's painting including it within the context of her body of work.

The context in which Eichwald presents the painting is very distant from the Cézanne piece.  The Eternal Feminine by Cézanne was painted in 1877. The painting is part of the J. Paul Getty Museum collection and is seen by thousands of people daily. Eichwald's The Eternal Feminine, on the other hand, was painted in 2012. The painting lives in her one-bedroom apartment in Chicago and the only person who has seen Eichwald's The Eternal Feminine in person (other than herself) is her boyfriend Michael. 

The distant history of both objects does not stop there. In 1954, the female nude in Cézanne's The Eternal Feminine was given a retouch to make her look less disturbing and more feminine. Only in 1991, Cézanne's The Eternal Feminine was restored to its "original." Eichwald's The Eternal Feminine female nude always had her red socket eyes.

While in most interpretations of Cézanne's The Eternal Feminine, a bald figure admiring the female nude might be Cézanne, in Eichwald's The Eternal Feminine, the bald figure is Cézanne. Also, in Eichwald's The Eternal Feminine, the female nude might be Eichwald herself (with her long golden hair). 

Cézanne's The Eternal Feminine has been known by many other titles such as The Golden Calf, The Triumph of
Woman, Apotheosis of Woman, La Belle Impéria, and The Whore of Babylon, while Eichwald's painting is only known by The Eternal Feminine. 

Paul Cézanne, The Eternal Feminine, 1877. (Picture between 1954-1991/ Without red eye sockets). (Credit: J. Paul Getty Museum) 

Truth and Markmaking

a mark i've kept

i'm aware of directness as a conceit in writing, a tool, as useful as metaphor or voice. ariana reines sometimes uses all caps and that makes me feel like she's speaking straight from the hip with no editing, a message sent through her like a prophet, but i also know that she's a craftswoman of language and i'd guess that her process curls back on itself like a snake spitting. eileen myles does it with run-ons and inconsistent capitalizations like she has to get it all out before it dissolves. there is truth and style in both of these ways of writing and i'm not even suggesting that truth and style are on opposite poles. and can you ever be without style? the way i move my hand when i paint, is that style? 

i always thought of writing as work and painting as the guiding of a force, especially in later years when i paint in a fever, surrounded by mess and coffee cups and rolls of wax paper half-dipped in blue latex, trailing. as though the mess and urgency kept me closer to something, but what? i do want truth, and i do think it exists, and i do think it exists in painting. but not because it aligns with something i already know is truth, or because it has the look of truth, or because i felt truthy when i made it. markmaking is a writhing pit and i am happily lost inside it. moments of clarity rise up and i stare at a line for days, trying to see what it is revealing to me. so many things in the visual world seem like they are opening themselves up to me, hoping to be seen and understood. the best of these are the things i make myself, because in their unfamiliarity i feel a rush of love, like my little brother doing calculus. a thing that is part of me surpassing me, becoming other. 

but painting has just as much fake-directness as writing does, if not more. all those men strong-arming their way into the canon, mistaking adrenaline and privilege for truth. and it's clear that writing toes the abyss just as painting does, the inconceivable possibilities of letters, the way a poem vibrates in the mind after reading it, the long, looping lives of characters that exist beside our own. when i finished dostoyevsky's "the idiot" a few weeks ago i sobbed in the shower and i wasn't even being self-indulgent. those characters deserve my sadness. their loss is real. this is why i keep the marks i make, the ones i have no practical use for, the ones no one else will ever see or buy. they are as real and living in the world as i am. unlike dostoyevsky, i'm the only one looking at them and usually i'm the only one who knows they are worth looking at. if you are an artist, you have these marks too, and you honor them in your own way. you know there's something there, truth or whatever, you don't need to call it anything. pink beside gray or black beside black or white beside white or a picture of a banana beside a weird purple or a thin line of something, you don't know what it is, you found it there on your palette like your palette was a doorstep.

Thoughts on an Aesthetic

Katelyn Eichwald, Untitled, oil on paper, 2011

i'm annoyed at brooklyn raw bare wood metalworking leather linen with the top button left open

which reeks of nothing but money and a bon iver fetishization of realness and utility

utility in my world is the sweat-yellow arm of the couch with a shirt draped to hide it

but i have said "fetishization" so many times this week that i'm starting to think i don't know what it means

though i am getting better at pronouncing it

i say it with bitterness like i deserve something better

a rabbit in another woman's arms

i know, some people just like to drink their whiskey like that

i'm no line of flour to the door

i have ideas about cool too and sometimes i can't get up from under them

i can't define myself against something all the time, especially an aesthetic so bloodless

and i understand that our objects have twisted and cruel origins these days and it is attractive to know what you're getting and where it came from

though as usual we want the appearance of honesty, not honesty itself, which grows darker on the edges

j. crew can make that hand-dyed wool cardigan look like my dead grandpa's, but it isn't my dead grandpa's, is it

like pain in a dream

what do i have against wealth?

oh everything

but is that ok or do i need to get over it?

it's the hatred you feel for your lover's ex

self-care, like cleaning your fingernails

nobody owes me anything

except love 

from the universe, not even from any person if they don't have it to give

art students walk into work with thick-soled boots and carhartt coats like dockworkers

but if carhartt coats weren't so stiff and uncomfortable i would wear them too

i love my dad's workbench in the back of the garage but i hate the sight of a pretty woman with premature gray hair in a 

topknot and a black silk shirt sitting at an identical workbench in a photograph

though god knows i wear enough black these days and the workbench doesn't know anything except what it is

and i bet she knows how to saw shit and that she's good at the things she does

what does she feel when she touches it? maybe she feels like a fighter

or maybe not

our target bookcases tremble

michael put them together himself

he screwed one of them on backwards

but it still holds my books

the couch i sit on crushed my mother's watch into her wrist

i think about it when i lean back on the cushions

the curtains on the window are the ugliest things i have ever laid my eyes on, they look like scars on a dirty body

do objects have integrity?

i'll kick all the things in this room with my bare foot, see what breaks

is my mother's crushed wrist worth less than my own?

the objects in her hand are her bones

Leftovers

Unknown image of bomb; stained scrap of paper; photo of a peach found in the "face painters" folder on my computer desktop; chalk pastel palette found in my parents' basement; Dante Gabriel Rossetti, "Arthur's Tomb," 1860, watercolor on paper; oil paint palette.

Why Is It "Bad"?

Ralph Pugay, Liondix, Acrylic on panel, 12" x 16", 2010. www.ralphpugay.com

Why do we feel the need to call our paintings "bad", "naive", "hobbyist", "crafty"?  
Why can't we just let them be what they are going to be?  
Is it because we are insecure?  
Is it because we want to make sure everyone knows that we are self-aware?  
Does it legitimize the paintings?  
Does it make the paintings humble?  
Does it make the paintings pretentious?
When we make a humorous painting, is it automatically sorted into one of the categories in my first question?
Who does this sorting?
Why are we uncomfortable laughing at a painting?
Is it because it lowers the entire art form?
Is this a bad thing?
Is painting not supposed to make us feel those emotions?
Does a painting have to be witty or conceptually intriguing if it is also "bad"?
Can a strong concept make up for poor aesthetic choices?
Who is evaluating this balancing act?
Must we always tip the scale one way or the other?
What is the difference between painting and illustration?
Is an illustrative aesthetic "bad"?
Why do we have to put "bad" in quotation marks?
When will irony die?

Do Painters Need Vision?

Edgar Degas, c.1905. Pastel on paper, 28-1/8 x 24-3/4 in. Norton Simon Art Foundation. 

Most painters with long careers go through some critical changes in their exploration of the medium. Phillip Guston, Pablo Picasso and Edgar Degas are some of the painters I have seen change most radically. When I think of Degas, for example, I think of how most works are delicate and precise in theme and formal nature. While at the Norton Simon Museum, however, I came across Degas’ Woman Drying her Hair. Degas, once again, depicted a delicate scene of a woman. However, formally, the drawing differed from the rest of the large amount of Degas being displayed there. On Woman Drying her Hair, the lines were reckless, aggressive, nervous and fast—like small cuts—while on the other Degas’ drawings, the lines were placed methodically as a vehicle to illustrate a specific feature or object. 

While painters like Guston or Picasso seemed to have changed aesthetic intentionally, what happens when a change in aesthetic is triggered by a physical difficulty—where the artist's intention was not to change the aesthetic? This seems to be what happened to Degas, whose vision problems altered how he saw his own work. 

Michael Marmor, MD, wanted to know what it was like to see through the eyes of an artist. Literally. Marmor blurred the image in “Woman Drying Her Hair” to a visual acuity of 20/300 to replicate what Degas might have seen. Credit: Michael Marmor

A great article on Michael Marmor's research on how eye diseases have change the way painters see their work:
http://med.stanford.edu/news_releases/2007/april/art.html

I highly recommend to zoom in into the work and listen to the audio tour: 
http://www.nortonsimon.org/collections/browse_title.php?id=M.1969.06.P

Crazy Eyes

Ramona Singer of Bravo's "Real Housewives of NYC", a textbook example of CE.

I love painting and drawing people's faces. Yes, of course there are other things that I paint and draw as well, including bodies, geometric forms and abstracted shapes, backgrounds and settings, but if I ever find myself confused or lacking interest, I will always go back to a face.

Within the face, I tend to get sidetracked by and excited most about the eyes. 

Bulging

Popping

Rolling

Flashing

Rocking back and forth

Deep-set

Wide-set

Heavy-lidded

One drooping

Crinkly

Twinkling

Beady

Lazy-eyed

Cross-eyed

The list goes on and on, and I love them all. The crazier they tend to be, the more I am seduced by their spell. But society and popular media have coined a term for unusual eyes to warn people about what's really going on with that person: they have themselves some "crazy eyes".  Now, people tend to either embrace this (Nicki Minaj frequently uses this as an attention-getting schtick, which fits with her look-at-me-I'm-so-crazy persona) or are completely embarrassed by it (Michelle Bachmann was furious with her August 2011 Newsweek cover shot).  After all, we look into someone's eyes to see if they are being honest. The ways our face contorts around our eyes determine what emotions we display. And if we want to know if someone is a vampire, we check to see if their eyes are red.

Michelle Bachmann doesn't like her crazy eyes.

Seriously, though, eyes are eyes. They are all fascinating. They are all crazy. I say that we start using "crazy eyes" with a positive connotation. For example, "She's quite the beauty from her long, gorgeous legs right up to her crazy eyes." What would be the opposite of crazy eyes, anyway? Sane eyes?

Life is too short to have sane eyes.