Artist: Emilie Buck Lewis
Title: Women With Their Heads Together
Media: Oil sketch on Canva-paper mounted to board
Size: 13x17
Price: $450
Artist Statement:
An artist’s training will most certainly include painting from life, including from live models. In my artistic practice, nothing has helped me grow as much as studying the figure from life. I’ve noticed through this practice how my attitudes about the body have morphed, and how my reverence for it has increased. I’ve noticed how much more I appreciate curves and folds, how they can create the loveliest shapes. I’ve thought a lot about how the body is formed—about how my body incubated and grew two little ones. I see the body as a particularly female gift. And I have learned about how attacks on the body are really attacks against feminine power, against Heavenly Mother. The body can be misused, abused, and exploited in ways we consider “bad,” but also in ways that have been promoted as “good.” I’ve learned that a nude body (and a nude painting) can be modest and completely appropriate, and that sometimes what we claim is “modest” is actually the furthest thing from modesty. I feel immense gratitude for the (mostly) female models that have been instrumental in contributing to my study of the human form. Without them I would be a very different sort of artist, and a very different sort of woman.