Customer Reviews

Lisa Yuskavage

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Being twenty and in art school I am in a constant battle to find my direction. I came across Lisa Yuskavage in a painting magazine six months ago. I was interested to see more of her work and find out what makes her paint. I immediatly set out to find some information about her and this was the perfect source. This thirty something painter is a women after my own heart she is inspired by the women of the new millenium. The book is a great catalog of her work very extensive. I strongly recomend this book to anyone looking for figurative inspired art.

In some of her recent pictures, Yuskavage has moved away from innocence and pastels. Interior: Big Blonde with Beaded Jacket (1997) is darker, in every sense, than her sisters. There is a calculation in her erotic self-presentation that is not mindless, and is, therefore, more sinister. The self-consciousness of Honeymoon (1998) is of a different sort. The artist has created a setting of mysterious mountains, moonlight, transparent drapery, and voluptuous nymph all rendered with the airbrushed perfection of a soft-porn magazine. As the artist steps back to get her accustomed distance, she exposes the clichés of the "romantic" image, removing the scene from the actual with anatomical exaggerations and distortions. True Blonde (1999) poses erotically, but covers her crotch with her hands. Is she concealing her pudenda, or playing with herself? Her lowered eyes show us a sadder, more introspective, side to the woman who accepts her role as sex symbol, but yearns for something more real. True Blonde Draped (1999) gives us a still more poignant and more unguarded view of her. She looks out at us with a self-awareness we have not seen before. Her face, particularly her eyes, are shadowed, giving her more age, more consciousness. Significantly, her lower body is draped, and this time, unmistakably, her hands are clasped protectively over her crotch. She is a woman endowed with the attributes of sexual allure blond hair and huge breasts-but they seem to be, for her, more a heavy burden than a useful weapon. She is a poignant portrait of a woman who longs to be taken as a person and not as a sexual object, but the postcoital air suggests that she is trapped in a role she does not know how to escape.
Lisa Yuskavage wants seriously to paint. She believes in the transforming beauty of pignient suspended in oil on canvas, and the ability of that beauty to suggest transcendence. She paints the shallow, the vulgar, the heedless as if it were profound, elegant, meditative, thereby reminding us obliquely of the absence of these qualities and the enduring possibility of their renascence.
From the essays by Claudia Gould "Screwing it on straight"

this is illustrated porn legitimzed by the academic art world; imagine for a moment this stuff was drawn by a man...in that case pepople wouldn't notice. but, it is painted by a woman so a whole feminist manifesto can be spoken aboutit. this represents the apex of the decline of art, the lack of ideas, the fraud of contemporary art. it is crap. oh and this book is not well reproduced with small pictures.

if you like lisa, then try john currin