‘You start to forget that you are naked’: the shock of the nude, with Stella Lyons | The Arts Society

The idea of the difference between a 'nude' and a 'naked portrait' was not something I had given much active thought to until I read this article. It is an interesting concept to me because I have been thinking about nude work in terms of eroticism and vulgarity. Working with Maria, I have developed a strong sense of knowing that I do not want to make vulgar or erotic art with my body. Even though I am quite disconnected from my body and have no issues with being naked, I am quite a reserved and shy person and I want to reflect that in the art that I create. I want to make elegant art that isn't sexual or vulgar at all because I tend to find it borderline disturbing and uncomfortable. 

I learnt this last year when I modelled for Maria who painted a grotesque version of Lolita onto my body complete with bloody vagina and dirty marks all over me. The disgust I felt when looking at myself in the mirror was a feeling I can only relate to the thought of when I was raped. I was disgusted by my reflection and this resonated into how I felt about myself. I learnt that the vulnerability and exposed nature of body painting is something I can only overcome if I feel confident in the paint that I am in. I really struggled with that shoot because I felt so disgusting which was a massive learning experience. Maybe I am ok with the thought that my body is titillating in its simple existence and I don't need to be overtly sexual to express my artistic vision. Since this day I have had a much more involved role in the colours that are applied to my body and focus on exuding my inner confidence and elegance through the paint that I am wearing.  

Nude bodies have often been idealised in art history and I enjoy breaking this tradition. However, my body fits the average beauty standards of the current decade, which means an actual criticism I have received in that my breasts are "too boob like". I view my art as a celebration of a body I have only just grown to love, but I am often met with praise which puts into perspective the distorted view of my body that I learnt in my formative teenage years. It's quite comical to me that my body is too symmetrical and therefore less interesting to look at. I quite agree, and yet am frustrated that because my body is the way it is I am both at an advantage and disadvantage when using it in my art.

 

Experimenting with the difference of confronting the viewer and shifting my gaze to allow my body to become the focal point. I don't consider myself to be naked when I am covered in paint but I choose to employ the word nude as the shape of my body dictates how the paint looks. I am still not sure whether I am trying to appeal to the male gaze or not. I rarely ask men what they think of my work; not for any particular reason that I can think of but rather I am surrounded by a lot of girls so I may be receiving a biased set of opinions. Nude paintings used to be painted by men with male viewers in mind but I do not have men in mind when I am making my art. I am inherently selfish in my creations because these pieces are so personal to my life. Maybe that is a road that I can explore further by changing who I make work for.

I've compiled my highlights of this article below:

Stella Looking at Munch's Madonna

To you, what is the difference between a ‘nude’ and a ‘naked portrait’ – as the Laing has categorised the works in its exhibition? This distinction between ‘nude’ and ‘naked’ is something art historians have been arguing about for years.

Kenneth Clark famously attempted to define both terms in his seminal 1956 book, The Nude. His argument was that ‘naked’ was a person without clothes, but that a ‘nude’ was ‘a form of art’. To him, the nude body was classically posed, idealised and perfected; Titian’s Venus of Urbino, or the beautiful, contorted bodies of Ingres’s odalisques. ‘Naked’, in art historical terms, brings to mind a more realistic and less idealised body; something exposed, vulnerable and flawed. For example, Manet’s scandalous Olympia, Egon Schiele’s bodies, Freud’s defenceless portraits, or Jenny Saville’s graphic paintings. But is there really a difference? I’m not sure there is. I think the term ‘nude’ has been distinguished from ‘naked’ as a way of making the body artistically acceptable and academic. It’s often been used to help justify paintings that are, in reality, very similar to soft porn; simply designed to titillate.

Can a nude be both erotic and ideal? Yes, absolutely. In the history of art, most eroticised images of female nudes are also idealised. They are presented in a mythological context, as goddesses, or ‘other’; detached from reality, and therefore perfectly acceptable for educated minds to look at. An example is the French artist Cabanel’s Birth of Venus. She is extremely idealised; a goddess with porcelain smooth skin and beautiful curves. She turns her head away from the viewer, so that her beauty can be gazed upon in a non-challenging or non-confrontational atmosphere. Most of the buyers and viewers for these works were male.

Has the nude lost its ability to be subversive? Not at all. I think the nude is now one of the most subversive and controversial genres in art. Today we are censoring images of the body at an increasingly alarming rate. In the age of #MeToo we are also questioning what is and isn’t appropriate to hang on the gallery wall. Only this year Manchester Art Gallery made the daring decision to remove Waterhouse’s Hylas and the Nymphs. In my opinion, this was insanity. If you want to start a debate about the nude, why remove the subject of the discussion? Secondly, of all the paintings to remove, this one seemed a strange choice. The painting illustrates a classical myth; the nudity is far less obvious and extreme than many other Victorian works, such as Alma-Tadema’s In the Tepidarium. Thirdly, the whole stunt was undermined by the fact that a female, Victorian artist Henrietta Rae, had painted the exact same subject even more erotically than Waterhouse. Had Manchester owned that painting, would they have removed it? Somehow, I think not. We call the Victorians prudish, but I think we are far more prudish than they ever were. And much more concerned with making the nude politically correct.

I think if you are a life model, you have to accept that you are going to be viewed as an object. You are just a mass of volumes that the artist is painting. It might be problematic for some feminists; you're stripping off in front of an artist who is viewing you as purely an object. But, for me, it's much more removed than that. I end up thinking about the history of art and the countless models that have gone before me.

‘You start to forget that you are naked’: the shock of the nude, with Stella Lyons | The Arts Society