I painted this and I’m posting it today because it’s featured in my solo show opening tonight at @wolffgallerypdx in Portland, OR.⠀
I was considering a nude self-portrait when I spoke with artist @catvandoren about one she was working on. She decided to change it because some men were making inappropriate comments on her social media accounts. I was also reading about 15th C Italian iconographer Cesare Ripa and his prescription for the Allegory of Painting. He said that the painting must be of a woman with wild hair, a colourful dress, a mask pendant, and she must be gagged because painting is silent poetry. In this painting I used all of Ripa’s stipulations, I have abandoned my nude self-portrait drawing on the wall, and I am gagged with a bra to show that us women artists are still limited by what we can say.
Jen Brown, The Allegory of Painting, 2019
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