I grab a cup of tea (Earl Grey, hot) and proceed to park myself in a weird corner thing. I look up. Bam. A painting sits across from me. Normally, like any normal cafe dweller, I would ignore it and keep drinking. Not today. The more I looked at it, the more it annoyed me, the more I began to delineate just how...irksome this thing is.
So, to describe the painting - it shows a tanned naked woman, sitting heel to bum, from behind, on her shins. Dark hair flows down her back to her shoulder blades. You know, it's a classic demure pose. And....and her body is made from giant black swirl patterns, with two giant swirls making up her bum cheeks.
At a glance, this is what people would see, and then move on. Whether or not they thought the painting was good art, I don't know - I imagine they would judge it on whether or not those swirls were pleasing. However, when you study this thing, it becomes clear just how badly made and hideous it really is - its subject matter, and what it implies, is borderline offensive; the construction ignores the rudiments of both painting and drawing. It is in terrible taste, and there are a panoply of down right bizarre creative decisions that permeate throughout.
First of all, the subject matter. This is a very common trope in cafe paintings - naked women, badly drawn or painted. She sits on a background of what looks like a caked mud effect - possibly the best technical element here (a painting of just this technique would be very good) - except she doesn't actually sit on it. She floats in a free space. It's as if the mud is simply a contextual frame for the floating female object to ogle. The caked mud, paired with the dark skin and hair, implies an certain earthy ethnicity. It's that sort of earth-mother-goddess mentality that objectifies Indian or African origin as a sort of natural or spiritualist touch stone. Really though - how colonialist, and how offensive! The swirls that make up the arse, and the reverent halo effect around the female object, helps compound this lurid objectification.
The painting, done in a loose style to imply... what, exactly? I'm sure the artist never really knows when it comes down to loose painting styles. They must know, on some level, that it covers up any intentionality behind the craft and lets them off the hook. The aforementioned swirls are the most obvious visual device used here, but it is not clear why they are used, other than to imply a curvaceousness of the female form, or for some eye candy. It fails on both accounts. Firstly, the female form itself is anatomically inaccurate. It looks as if it was done half from imagination and half from a photo found on Google image search. The torso is too long and the curves are... inhuman.
Loose painting and inaccurate anatomy aren't bad per se - art can use any tool it wants. However, it is clear that for this painting, a thoughtless trope was badly executed to give an overall sense of a beautiful female form. It is clear they attempted an accurate portrayal of a female body, but failed, so it turns the beautiful into the hideous. Alongside this, there is an embossing technique used for the swirls, making the already crisp lines even more stark and blunt. Finally, the hair is a monotone blob with two thick lines implying strands, but failing miserably. So what we are left with is an unintentional caricature or cartoon of a painting of a beautiful lady.
I had come back from the loo and was grimacing at these swirls up close. I make a break for the exit. On the way out, two more paintings catch my eye - big vagina type things - but they'll have to wait.
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Mini bonus tea review: the Earl Grey was okay. This cafe seems to do some really good teas, which unfortunately I didn't sample. The Earl looked posh, in a nice tea bag, but it was a bit intense on the flavour. A bit like Lord Bergemot himself had arrived.
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