Artist's Statement: Confessions of a Realist

Author(s): Esther Hyneman

Source: Feminist Studies, Vol. 23, No. 3 (Autumn, 1997), pp. 633-644
Published by: Feminist Studies, Inc.
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 ART ESSAY
ESTHER HYNEMAN

ARTIST'SSTATEMENT:CONFESSIONSOF A REALIST

As I write this essay, I occasionally glance across the room at

the nine-by-six-footbookcase I built a few years ago to house
all my books on feminism, gender and cultural theory, and vi-
sual culture. I've approached this material haunted by phan-
toms of previous selves: the teenager tormented by a humiliat-
ing secret about herself and desperately trying to be straight;
the closeted lesbian, as homophobicas everyone else she knew;
the high school student who swallowed whole hog the idea that
only men could be (great) artists; the sixties' Ph.D. candidate in
a devoutly sexist English department, whose absence from the
literature she revered hardened her more than ever against
her own desires. But mainly I've been reading theory as some-
one who finally shed these versions of herself, embraced her
lesbianism, and turned herself into a painter. As this person,
I've compulsively scoured my library for a "solution"to the
problem of being a Realist painter at a time when Realism, not
to mention painting itself, unless leavened by irony or rage, or
preaching from the pulpit of political correctness, has been
deemed irrelevant if not actually hazardous.l And although I'm
up-to-date on matters of feminist theory, without question the
most valuable lesson I've learned from my commitment to a
(temporarily) discredited genre is that I have to trust my in-
stincts. They have assured me that painting, even Realist
painting, can still be a viable means of making sense of our
time and ourselves.
I've started by talking about the body of work we call "theo-
ry"not only because in the academic world you're obliged to ac-
knowledge it, if you hope to be taken seriously, and not only be-
cause so much art that's been in vogue in recent years seems to
Feminist Studies 23, no. 3 (fall 1997).? 1997 by Feminist Studies, Inc.
633

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634 Esther Hyneman

have no life independent of some abstract idea about subjectiv-

ity (human identity is fragmented; let's stick some body parts
up on a museum wall, etc.), but also because I believe in the
connection between art and politics and think about that con-
nection all the time. But regardless of how much theory I ab-
sorb or how intently I dwell on the politics of my own work, my
painting is fueled by something different:by a passion to cap-
ture in oil paint the corporealityof the human form, the con-
tainer I feel locked into and out of at the same time, which is
me but which I can never fully know. In my small and intimate
renderings of women's faces and bodies, I try to maximize, to
push beyond established boundaries, the experience of appre-
hending the body through paint, an experience that feels pri-
mal to me.
I'm obsessed by the erotics of painting flesh and looking at
paintings of flesh and by the disquieting engagement between
painter, subject, and viewer. If my paintings work at all, it's be-
cause I've ignited in the viewer the same thrill I feel when
paint appears to turn into the body itself. And so I pay very
close attention to the complex surface of the body, its lumps
and bumps, its wrinkles and traces of veins, to the way it
stretches over bones and muscles and organs, all the parts of
ourselves we never see but which constitute our selves, keep us
going and finally betray us. I want viewers to feel my painted
bodies in the palms of their hands, to want to slide their fin-
gers into the hollows of the flesh-in other words, to experience
my paintings primarily in their own skin.
The desire to bring the figure to life is the essence of repre-
sentation, and Western culture is replete with narratives about
it. It's a search for something that can never be definitively
captured, a flirtation with disappointment. In fact, disappoint-
ment is a subject of many of my paintings, disappointment
with what the painting can finally be and do. People ask me
how I know a painting is finished. I know it's finished when I
can't get the figure to seem any more alive, when I've achieved
a presence I can't surpass. But the satisfaction never lasts.
Eventually, days or months later, the same painting seems less
realized than I originally thought, and I have to push on to an-
other level. Sometimes I return to earlier work and attempt to
raise the stakes.

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Esther Hyneman 635

Thus for me the act of painting is rooted in my gut rather

than my head. This comes as a surprise. Years ago, when I first
began to paint, it was important for me to define myself as a
feminist artist above anything else. I owe to feminism my rein-
vention of myself as a painter, the transformation of my life in
my mid-forties. I had problems with women who wanted to be
known as artists but not feminist artists. I wanted to have an
influence on how women lived. I thought of my brushes as
weapons aimed at demolishing the stereotypes of women in
Western art. I had the naive notion that the way to achieve
this was simply to treat women as subjects rather than objects,
to respect their individuality,to be sure to create a balance be-
tween subject-necessarily-being-looked-atand subject-stating-
her-case-for-who-she-is. My paintings of Maxine Shear, who
had a radical mastectomy when she was thirty years old, are
the work of this period. But as I've explained, politics don't get
to the essence of what I'm doing on canvas.
My work is rooted in the history of Western art, which it
openly respects as one of the great achievements of human his-
tory. But a more specific source is certainly my early terror of
being gay. Well into my twenties, I thought of myself as
chained to a body that willfully ignored the commands issuing
from its head. That body,with its wayward desires, was my en-
emy. Psychoanalysis teaches us that all people are alienated
from their incoherent bodies, but some people-like those homo-
sexuals who grow up believing themselves to be botched jobs,
who have yearned for a self their culture deems normal-expe-
rience that alienation in a particularly corrosive way. And my
estrangement from my physical self was further complicated
by my parents' relationships to their own bodies, which was
nothing if not secretive and guilt-ridden.
Seen from this perspective, my work can be thought of as a
way back into a body that once seemed hostage to alien inter-
ests. And if it depicts a more intact version of the body than
most politically oriented contemporary artists seem comfort-
able with, fixated as they are on dismemberment, fragmenta-
tion, the grotesque and the taboo, it isn't that I have illusions
about resurrecting the ideals of the past, ideals which failed to
deliver on their promises. The art world may consider Realism
conservative, but I think of my paintings as visually provoca-

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636 Esther Hyneman

tive and certainly anti-idealist. At a time when the shock value

of sexually confrontationalart seems to be reaching its limits,
yielding work strong in political statement but weak on pas-
sion, a different approachto the issues about body and identity
that haunt contemporaryculture might yield fruit.2

My paintings start from candid photos I take of someone I feel

deeply connected to: Marcey,for example (I paint from photos
because my subjects don't have the time it takes to pose for a
slow painter like myself). I have hundreds of photographs,and
I pour over them until one sneaks up and turns me on, or per-
haps I turn the photo on by projectingsomething of myself into
it. But whichever way it happens, suddenly I'm struck by
something I haven't seen before:the way the head is balanced
on the neck, sometimes gracefully,sometimes uneasily; by the
vulnerability of the neck sitting on the shoulders, thrusting the
head forward or pulling it back suspiciously from the camera.
Through these subtle gestures some human essence seems to
be revealed. I've done well over twenty paintings of Marcey.In
them she appears vulnerable, angry, frightened, yearning,
amused, wary, suspicious, contemplative, seductive, question-
ing, sly. She looks different from one painting to the next, and
until they begin to recognize her wardrobe, some viewers
aren't sure they're looking at the same person.
I want to write about Marcey, who until recently was my
principal subject, because her unexpected reaction to my paint-
ings may be an example of the very issues about the body the
paintings explore. When I first began to paint her, in 1989, I
was a novice casting about for an interesting model. Her face,
with its soft, pulpy folds and mobile expression, seemed the
perfect material. She was seventy-nine years old then, and
most people who have seen this work think I chose her origi-
nally because her powerful presence and complex character
defy our culture's attempt to erase or demonize older women.
But for me the emotional connection, the personal attraction,
always precedes any ideas I might eventually develop about
what I've been doing. As the paintings mounted up and my re-
lationship with Marcey deepened, I got addicted to painting
her. I began to consider the projectof documentingthis spirited

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Esther Hyneman 637

woman's final decades as a life's work. Above all, I saw it as a

collaboration.There was no end in sight.
But Marcey never liked my paintings of her-although she
always encouraged me to continue the project. She thought I
made her too old, or too hostile or too aggressive, always too
something. I couldn'ttell whether she was recoiling from quali-
ties she recognized and didn't want exposed or whether I actu-
ally misrepresented her. After all, as close as we were, as inter-
ested as I was in her, how much could I really know about her
and how much of her private self could I convey on canvas? At
the same time, the more I concentratedon this series, the more
I recognized in these paintings, in Marcey'sface, my own anxi-
eties about aging and mortality, about sex and sexuality, about
intimacy, about establishing my voice, about being in the
world. The paintings were all versions of me. I was revealing
myself through her.
The artistic relationship between Marcey and me eventually
broke down over a series of nude paintings I began in 1992,
and which I agreed not to exhibit until after her death. Her de-
sire to keep these paintings private is the reason they aren't
reproduced in Feminist Studies. As well as documenting the
body's aging process, I think they recover for older women the
sensuality, beauty, and physical power which our culture has
traditionally denied them. On the other hand, perhaps they
(and all my paintings of Marcey as well as my other nudes) ac-
tually perpetuate the practice in Western art of objectifying
women's bodies, reducing women to their physical selves while
at the same time denying them control over their own bodies
and their sexuality. The situation that has developed between
Marcey and me may embody that very issue. When I look at
my paintings of her, the portraits and the nudes, what I see in
them lends dignity and power to her as a woman. When she
looks at them, she sees something else, something she doesn't
like and doesn't want revealed. And we seem to be caught up
in a dichotomy that mirrors another aspect of Western cul-
ture-how its obsession with the body takes the form of simul-
taneously hiding it from view and exposing it. Why does this
eighty-five-year-old woman, who lives in another country, a
professional photographerwhose subject matter is people, who
is interested in Western art and makes a beeline for museums

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638 Esther Hyneman

whenever she's in New YorkCity,want to hide my paintings of

her body from people who, except for a handful, don't know
her? Is it shyness, or is it more than that-shame of the body it-
self? Of her age? Of her mortality? Of her sexuality? Or is she
safeguarding her body and the bodies of other women from
what she senses are invasive, voyeuristic eyes? As her friend
and as someone whose subject is women's complex and am-
bivalent relationships to their bodies, I would like to under-
stand what lies behind her restriction. As her erstwhile
painter, I may feel thwarted by it, but at the same time I know
that her right to decide what happens to her body must be
honored and protected.
I've reacted to this experience by embarking on a series of
self-portraits. I thought I'd be safer with myself, but I'm al-
ready stymied. I don'tknow how to look at myself. I don'tknow
what I see when I do look. It was easier to get to myself indi-
rectly,through Marcey and the other women I've painted, than
by staring at myself in a mirror.

NOTES
1. Carol Kino's discussion of Realism's current revival in "Realism:The New Hip?"
ARTnews, February 1997, 96-99, is long on galleries currently exhibiting this work
but short on conviction.Even Linda Nochlin, Realism's doyenne, sounds doubtful.
2. For a timely statement on this matter, see Mark Stevens, "Is Sex Dead?"New
York Magazine, 21 July 1997, 38-43.

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Esther Hyneman 639

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640 Esther Hyneman

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Fig. 2. Esther Hyneman, Marcey Jacobson, oil on canvas,

42 x 34 inches, 1990.

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Esther Hyneman 641

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Fig. 3. Esther Hyneman, MarceyJacobson in 1993, oil on canvas,

10 x 14 inches, 1993.

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642 Esther Hyneman

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Fig. 4. Esther Hyneman, Janet Marren in 1990, oil on canvas,

44 x 30 inches, 1992.

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Esther Hyneman 643

Fig. 5. Esther Hyneman, Marcey Jacobson and Janet Marren in 1992, oil on
canvas, 30 x 36 inches, 1993.

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644 Esther Hyneman

-i.6s0, S

Fig. 6. Esther Hyneman,Maxine Shear, Age 60, with a 30 Year-OldRadical

Mastectomy,oil on canvas, 25 x 23 inches, 1991.

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