CHANTAL JOFFE
Chantal Joffe’s large-scale paintings celebrate the female form even as
they distort it—to great effect—with thick, unfussy brushstrokes.
Occasionally Joffe will paint her subjects directly from life or from
photos she has taken of them, but more often, she borrows from fashion
spreads, ads, and friends’ family snapshots. For her portraits of
Chastain, Joffe tried something new: She simultaneously drew from
photographs Max Vadukul had taken of Chastain in a bedroom at New York’s
Gramercy Park Hotel, as
well as from her own observations of Chastain,
whom she directed in that shoot via Skype from her London studio. Joffe
says the red-haired actress reminded her of nudes by Gustav Klimt, Egon
Schiele, and Edvard Munch (“Her rawboned face seemed to me quite
old-fashioned,” she notes), so the bed was covered with richly patterned
fabrics. But when Joffe saw Chastain in person and in real time on her
laptop, she says she glimpsed “a slight awkwardness to her that was sort
of charming. I wanted to find a way to paint that—to know her slightly
so I could hold onto the awkwardness and not make it too smoothed out or
pretty-pretty. She had a way
of slumping that was really natural. That
felt like a blessing to me, because it’s hard for me to edit artifice
out of my head.” Joffe first made watercolors to sort out details, then
created enormous 10-foot works by using scaffolding. “As they go along,
everything seems
to become more exaggerated in the paintings. In one, she’s somewhat hunched and looks sort of
startled and a bit annoyed; in the other one [above], she seems withheld—but in an empowered way, as if she’s in
charge.”
MICKALENE THOMAS
“What’s always intriguing to me is transforming my subjects into a
character from another era,” says Mickalene Thomas, whose
rhinestone-embellished collage paintings, photographs, and installations
have regularly given African-American women a starring role. Posed as
reclining odalisques, 1970s
divas, and bold nudes, they express
Thomas’s fascination with female power and stereotypes of black
femininity.
For this portfolio, Thomas photographed Chastain in one of
the ’70s-inspired domestic interiors she had constructed for her recent
retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum. She created “a performance inside
a finished work of art” by instructing Chastain to “wait for your man to
come home so you can seduce him.” Though Donna Summer blared from a
record player and the set was reminiscent of the disco era, Thomas said
her references ranged from portraits by Balthus and Edouard Manet to
scenes from the 1983 film Scarface. She asked Chastain to channel her
own version of the drug kingpin’s moll in that film (played by Michelle
Pfeiffer) and had her blinged out from wig to toe in shimmering shades
of gold. “I tend to gravitate toward characters who have a razor-sharp
edge,” Thomas says. “I saw Jessica’s character as a woman who has
conquered her environment. There’s a sense of triumph.” Throughout her
career, the artist, who is African-American, has mostly painted “those
closest to me—my friends and family,” but she insists that her choice of
subject is not contingent on ethnicity. “I’m interested in their energy
and the look in their eyes and the confidence they convey. It’s about
the essence of their prowess.”
