Artist’s Statement: Sadie Lee on reworking rococo painting for GFEST
This article originally appeared on Culture24.
Celebrated LGBT painter offers fresh perspective on Francois Boucher with work at the Menier Gallery for GFEST 2014© Sadie Lee
"I haven't shown them yet. I have a studio on my own so I've been making them in complete isolation and then I've delivered them on Friday. They were all wrapped up so nobody's seen them. So I'm kind of awaiting the response, I've no idea what's going to happen.
They’re based on some François Boucher paintings. So they're mid-18th century rococo and I picked him because the theme for the overall festival is mythology and he made a number of paintings that referenced various Greek myths.
But he did a lot of paintings that had women, couples, and, particularly, [the goddess] Diana in various states of undress with various people.
His style is obviously the epitome of that chocolate box, prettified, bright, sensual, decorative style and I just thought it would be quite interesting to maybe bring them up to date and have François Boucher for the digital age.
So I've removed his original very decorative couplings and replaced them with more graphic images that are found images from vintage porn sites. It was quite an interesting experiment to try and make them look as much like his work as possible.
Unfortunately I didn't go to the Paris Academy for 25 years and study under him so I might not be doing it in quite the same style. He's got an incredibly distinctive style, so attempting to replicate that was something that I hadn’t done before.
If you're familiar with the images then you would recognise which bits I've taken from him and which bits I've subverted and added my own touches to. People think when you're subverting an image like that you're in some way criticising it, but I grew up loving these images.
All the images that I was aware of as a young person who was interested in art, they were generally made by men and I would pin those postcards on my wall. So yeah, it's a kind of homage to that but it also is making it more personal and reworking it from a queer vantage point.
The theme of myth was chosen by the people who put on GFEST, but I was very inspired by it. I mean, classical mythology was a way of making sense of the world. So it was a way of looking at natural phenomena and then having some elaborate story to explain it. I think there's generally a form of moral ethics in there as well.
But this is a queer festival and I think - taking the idea of mythology and myths to its full extent and all it's different meanings and intonations - there is a sense of myth growing up queer. I think that we often are inventors of our own identities.
And we are not generally the target audience for a lot of things that we nonetheless are drawn to and have to adapt it and make it our own to have some kind of personal resonance. So I think myth and that idea of making sense of things appeals to queer people.
The actual myths which I was subverting...they are quite heteronormative. In one the story is that Calisto was a handmaiden, a nymph who was linked to Diana, and she'd sworn a vow of celibacy and loyalty.
Jupiter had tried it on with her and she wasn't going there. So in order to get close to her he adopted the guise of Diana, and of course that was ‘okay’. That's the point at which François Boucher decided to depict them in a painting of these two women in an embrace.
But there’s the brown eagle of Jupiter in the background so we know it's okay. They're not really two women getting it on. We all know that actually it's okay, because it's a man really. He's just dressed up as a woman to give it that justification. So it's titilating and erotic, but not disrupting the status quo too much.”
- Lee’s paintings can be seen in the GFEST visual art exhibition at Menier Gallery until November 22 2014.
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