Women Painting Men - Riverside Arts Center

Jessica Stanfill, "Gabrielle and the Swan"

Women have been depicting men for a very long time. Recent analysis of hand prints found beside prehistoric cave paintings suggests that the majority of early artists were female. When we visit the art museum today, however, nearly all of the historic paintings on display have been attributed to men. Since the society they addressed was patriarchal, women have often been depicted as they might best serve the needs that gender -- primarily as mothers or sexual partners.

As men continue to need women to fulfill such roles, it’s not likely that these kinds of depictions will ever be abandoned. But sixty percent of art school graduates are now female, and patriarchal priorities have been waning for several generations. What kind of roles do contemporary creative women see men as playing? The demographic of this show is rather limited. All of the artists are early millennials who got MFA’s locally within the last ten years. Not only is each of them white, but so are all the men they depict. There is variety in these depictions, from fear to pity to ridicule, but nothing like admiration and respect. Men have an over inflated view of their own importance: economically, intellectually, and sexually. They need to be taken down a notch or two. It’s payback time.

Jessica Stanfill offers us the naked man as either a drunken, inflatable sex toy or as part of a bland floral arrangement. Mel Cook scrawls the voyeurish details of male frontal nudity on the back of a boy’s prim and tight white briefs. Katie Halton depicts a bunch of beefy bearded guys hanging out at a beer garden to posture their Neanderthal manliness Celeste Rapone imagines a fairy tale villain as a child’s stuffed toy whose fat pink nose and clenched white teeth are interwoven with thin, spindly arms and a blue feather boa. Karen Azarnia depicts a bald, shirtless old man wading through a field of high grass as he desperately tries to escape something that frightens him. Gwendolyn Zabicki depicts a tree trimmer who is certainly more strong, daring, and adept than any of the men shown above, but the result of his work is pathetic. He has cut every branch off the mighty elm and reduced it to an ugly, ludicrous stump.

In all of these paintings, formal quality feels no more than sufficient to deliver the intended narrative. Like viewing a political cartoon, after you get the idea, you might as well move on. That may be the legacy of a certain kind of art education.

What about recognizable portraits? What about serious depictions of men at their best as well as their worst? What about depictions of the opposite sex as actually sexy? What about narratives that are more explicit than puzzling, and more affirming than ironic? What about artists from other ethnic groups as well as outside the conceptual world of contemporary art? It wouldn’t be a bad idea to have “Women Painting Men” become an annual exhibition - but with even more variety next time. It also might not be a bad idea to gather these same skilled and sophisticated artists around a less ideological theme.