Blog Post #4

On the MoMA website, I found an interesting piece under the ‘painting and sculpture’ category. It is named Wrist Corsage and made by Lisa Yuskavage in 1996. It measures 6 by 7 inches, and is a two-dimensional oil on linen painting. The colors are cool and analogous, going from a variety of light blues, to tints of light green/teal. I would say that the center attention for me would be the small amount of color on the girl’s corsage in the painting. There are some orange flowers and pink, and the rest of the painting, as I said before, are a blend of blue or green. On the right side is a naked girl, who is “heavy built”, and looking at a small picture of a school girl (which is supposedly representing the ideal female figure). The girl which is viewing the picture also has her face hidden by her short hair. I think that the style of this painting would have to be both realistic, and stylized. It shows all of the imperfections of an ‘average female body’, in a cartoon form which would be because of the shape of her body. Some body parts are disproportional than others, for example her butt and legs compared to her tiny arms. The artist is claimed to be expressing her feelings about her “constant longing for perfection” and trying to fit into society’s view as the “ideal image of a female”. The meaning of the painting goes along well with a line from John Berger’s selections from “Ways of Seeing”; “A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself”.  In the painting the girl is struggling with her body shape, and saddened by her image. She is frightened of herself, how she is viewed by society and “ghost of the ideal body”.