Feast

 

A CULMINATING EXHIBITION

FOR THE BACHELOR OF FINE ARTS DEGREE

 

By

 

Misty Findley

 

Mentor: J Pouwels

 

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This series explores how depictions of raw meat can be used to discuss the nature of beauty in terms of art. The lush painting style of the meat is in reference to High Renaissance paintings which glorified violent scenes of martyrdom, as well as the still life paintings of the Dutch Golden Age, which often depicted fresh and exotic food and game with rotten fruit and reminders of mortality.

In these paintings, meat becomes a glittering landscape through cropping and focusing on the rich details, the textures, and the luster of the meat. Chicken feet have been cut into, bent, and arranged to emphasize the alabaster color of the skin against the vivid hues of their insides, making it apparent that these are truncated remnants of what was once a living being. This work, like the famous scene in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange where the protagonist performs Gene Kelly’s “Singing in the Rain” while committing atrocities, or the flowery prose style of the monstrous protagonist in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, gives space for the uncomfortable grey area where beauty and trauma converge.