I have been working on six images for The Event, a contemporary arts festival taking place next week. I love history. I can’t help it. So many events from history seem almost unbelievable, the story of the royals is pure soap opera, full of betrayal, beheading, power struggle and the plain strange. The six images I am making are based on paintings of Kings and Queens chosen with my own numerical and artistic objectives in mind.
The first in the series is Queen Anne:
Anne
Painting by Willem Wissing, (1687).
I’ve always loved the discussion of the male/female gaze. Traditionally it begins with a comparison of Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538) with Manet’s Olympia (1863), followed by Kruger’s Untitled (Your Gaze Hits The Side of my Face) (1981).
What I love about Wissing’s image is it seems to buck the trend. Her pose is not so much traditional regal,as it is relaxed, even approachable. She fingers the royal robe absent mindedly to remind us that to her, leadership is second nature. Her right arm is raised in an easy recline, while her left is draped over her knee, hand over her upper thigh, fingers open. Her clothes are of a similar tone, there is nothing stiff about her dress, the shoulders are not bear, but the sleeves part as if to reveal them. Her neck line is low enough to reveal the upper half of her chest, but the delicacy of the shading is more suggestive than revealing, and is relaxed enough to inform the viewer that the gaze is not theft. And that brings us to that gaze…
Anne’s gaze is direct, completely confident, and uncompromising in it’s power, yet it is also good humoured, a trace of a smile can be seen on her lips and her eyes have a slight flirtatious lift to them that suggest whatever the meaning is between the gaze of the viewer and the sitter, she is not only in on it, but completely in control.
To see what how my own interpretation of this image has turned out, come down to The Event next week, a completely free arts festival run in Birmingham’s Digbeth.