Paintings by Aleah Chapin
Art/Movie Review
老年女性之美和爱的思考
Part I
In Ms. Chapin’s paintings, women are not defeated by old age or the inevitable decay of biology. Those figures are expressions of defiance and desires to live despite the measured length of Fate one was allotted. Nudes of elderly women have not been the desired subject for painters and viewers alike throughout art history. Beauty was really skin-deep. Sexual tension seems immature in most of the psycho-erotic, well-arranged paintings of naked women (and men) while “traditions” and techniques were being recycled generation after generation.
The aesthetic evolution has reached a point where artists begin to reconsider the meanings of Art as an “argument.” Needless to say, any serious artist would argue with oneself about the motivation and the meaning for creating a piece of art. The process of creation in art is usually “invisible” in the piece itself, that is, the physical and spiritual experience one has had prior to the completion of one’s work, and that’s what makes art enduring.
Old age is the shadow that follows everyone under the indiscriminate sun. The physically aged bodies do not need too much manipulation of light on canvas in order to reveal their weight and folds of time which are “unpleasant” even in one’s own eyes. Everyone wants to “look young and less wrinkled” under the delusion of being forgotten by gravity.
Chapin’s series have no argument with gravity. Her figures seem to stand in the center of earth, a barren earth to be more exact. Their surroundings offer nothing for them to hide their physical appearances under a bleak sun. The light seems subdued, or unforgiving, and the colors are masterfully mixed with joy, pain and acceptance of Life.
What attracts me in these paintings are the intimacy between the artist and her subjects as well as the solidarity between the naked women themselves bound together by a shared knowledge and wisdom. Maybe there’s no such a thing as “wisdom,” which is supposed to be humans’ instinct to live and love without any superimposed ideologies, in other words, fears and foolish value systems.
Chapin’s painstakingly strokes seem to have erased the fear all together from the faces of her naked women. They pose unapologetically in front of an imaginary camera, it seems. Their identities are strong as far as Identity goes. They reflect the land and wintry trees behind them, but at the same time, the paintings do not lack playfulness which is hard to find in the majority of age-fearing group of fair sex.
In these paintings, life energy flows peacefully. I chose not to think about Lucian Freud’s nudes because his are a different expression of “trapped energy.” His blunt brush treats the body in a rude fashion with a smoldering feeling of rebellion. “Life” in Freud’s nudes is not resolved. The realism of pain is explicitly revealed through his signature thick pigment and enclosed lighting.
I later realized how violent Freud’s paintings are and his figures are cut off from the natural world, which is really significant in reflecting our modern day isolation and self-consumption. He recreated his figures as if looking with a pair of teary eyes. His arrangemnt shows a dictating manipulation and male language.
Unlike other full frontal nudes, Chapin’s women seem to have found a “balance” in nature where we all came and will return to. I don’t see any pretentious and catchy eroticism in these paintings. Her lyricism contains a pleasant invitation to a new-found liberation and openness.
We are creatures of cultures and traditions. Nowadays, one is easily consumed by both no matter how much “freedom” one has to conceptualize and rationalize what information poured over our receiving mind and fogged our senses. Most of us have become used to the rapid recycle of information, thus the recycle of human beings. We are valued less and less for who we are. Instead, we are willing to be valued by our market skills like trained animals in a circus.
We are no longer defined by our primary culture and tradition alone. Our pathetic method of survival comforts a little in terms of understanding more serious facts that await us all. New, exciting art leads us to a better place and ensures us that nothing can take away our identity, not old age; Not even death.
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