Summary of Lisa Yuskavage
New York City painter Lisa Yuskavage's women arrive to her canvas in pearlescent swaths of otherworldly color straight from the annals of candy-hued fantasies. Throbbing with a sexual tension that teeters between liberation and objectification, her women take center stage, their highly exaggerated bulbous genitalia and voluptuous nudity meticulously inspired by classical High Renaissance techniques yet wrapped in the provocative questions of contemporary society. Are her women enjoying their own private moments of unabashed sensual bloom under the complicated gaze of society's sexual mores? Or are they expressing their personally complex relationship with their own bodies that women universally lament as they navigate an environment where body parts are elevated to iconic status as in the traditional, historical nude? Yuskavage's semi-uncomfortable foray into this centuries' old exploration of the female body has catapulted her into her current role as a leading figurative painter of our time.
Accomplishments
- An innocent early fascination with the female body and the various ways it could be presented was the original impetus for Yuskavage's painting. Over time, this fascination evolved when Yuskavage realized she was bored with merely painting women, and began to materialize an unmistakable signature style based in overly sexualized figures lingering in a visceral ambiance between passivity and control.
- In true Postmodern fashion, Yuskavage's paintings build up imagery from multiple art historical sources, often containing references to artists who have influenced her. In doing this, she treats art history as a fertile soil from where multiple new ideas can be grown. A prime example of this is her often use of sfumato.
- Yuskavage has stated that her favorite thing about viewing Renaissance paintings, was that she could see in them that, "the supernatural has arrived." She accomplishes her own sort of supernatural feel by presenting color palettes that seem highly unnatural and built upon the frothy tones of dream worlds preferred by young girls.
- Yuskavage has suffered much criticism from feminists and other groups concerned with the treatment of women in popular culture. Yet, instead of eschewing blame for her own presumed collusion, she honestly states, "Misogyny is so rampant, extreme and insidious that it doesn't get called out nearly enough. A lot of men, including gay men, are misogynists, and a lot of women are too. I've experienced it personally from so many, and I can therefore assume that because I live in this society I must have absorbed it too, so if I want to talk about misogyny I have to first acknowledge the aspects of it I've absorbed."
Biography of Lisa Yuskavage
When Lisa Yuskavage was scanning a Penthouse magazine for inspiration for her "soft porn" paintings in a shop one day, a man approached and asked if she was doing research. She told him she was doing whatever he was doing, adding: "I didn’t want to lose the right to be a creep. I want the range. I don’t just want to be a good feminist doing research."
