The Female Gaze on the Female nude

I began my drawings looking at my body in the nude. I wanted to explore that subject matter as I had seen so many feminist artists explore the female gaze in this way. Its bold, daring and brave. It’s also meant to be empowering. I thought it would be a good way at depicting myself on my terms.

I began with just one medium, mechanical pencil, keeping to a simple monochromatic approach. I really loved playing around with tone in order to realistically capture my body within these quick sketches. I think I did well at capturing the curves and details of my body using cross hatching as a simple yet effective technique. I really like the compositions I had to work with here as they provided a unique look at my body from an open and intimate perspective. It felt empowering to draw myself in such a confident way and I felt like my body wasn’t being sexualised but rather becoming the confident person that I wanted to capture and be. I feel these drawings captured myself in a female gaze.

• 

• 

I tried more challenging poses continuing with my use of the mechanical pencil. I looked at less revealing poses, covered in a silk blouse. I really love the first one, as it just shows myself in a moment of buttoning up my shirt rather than posing, it is more natural and feels more alive because of that. Depicting the silk fabric wasn’t too much or too intense to do either, I usually find fabrics frustrating and tedious which is why I prefer to draw skin, but I think I captured the smooth texture very well. The second drawing, while I like the pose, I didn’t do well accurately capturing the proportions of my face at all. The eye placement and positioning looks very off, and the mouth should be a bit lower. I find it very difficult to draw my face even from photographs but I don’t have as much trouble drawing other people. I think this is due to struggling to physically perceive myself and how I look sometimes. If I want to pursue drawing myself further, Ill need to get better at understanding my facial features and how they fit onto my face.

• 

• 

I tried to be more experimentative with my pencil drawings and began including pops of colour with coloured pencils. I mixed together around areas with cool purples, oranges, reds and greens in order to make a skin tone effect. Using blues in the shaded areas I made the shadows on the face and body pop. When working in areas that contained shadows, such as my boob in drawing [1], I used cool purples and blues with the pink and orange tones to help accentuate that the area is darker and shaded. I liked keeping wider areas absent of colour to help certain areas, shadows and details stand out for a more stylised drawing. The colours are not meant to be realistic but add saturation to an otherwise colourless drawing. I think it works well but I feel other techniques and mediums might be more effective visually.
I went back to a nude pose for these drawings, but more covered and less open. I think the direct eye contact works well to create some sort of relationship with the viewer. With Drawing [1] I think the tone is a lot more serious because of my face lacking in expression as opposed to Drawing [2], where I have a slight smile on my face while maintaining the eye contact. I think that creates a sense of intimacy and closeness, which I like. I think this composition does fit the female gaze, the idea of lying on a bed reminds me of a sleepover setting with girl talk, or sharing secrets late at night. Intimate discussion perhaps with a partner. I look like I could be listening in the drawings creating some sort of safe space for the viewer to talk or share. It’s a nice positive thing I feel.

I switched up my approach, trying gouache and watercolour together on top of a pencil sketch. I began by laying down a watercolour base, washing over my pencil drawing in an olive green. I then began mixing my skin tones out of gouache, with red, blue, yellow and white. I liked working with the thick consistency on this relatively quick gouache study. I think I got the colours quite accurate just maybe I need to blend and work them more, rather than have areas of blocked in tone. I was inspired by my previous drawings from Part 4 where I layered watercolour underneath oil pastels. I think the oil pastels worked better but I thought about maybe limiting the amount of mediums used, something thinner as well so the pencil work can show through.

I liked looking at myself for subject matter, I think beginning my work on the female gaze using my own body was best, and also the only option within a third lockdown. I had some strain in my personal life while working through this, which is why I took so many breaks and took so long to get it done. While I find sharing my body and my experiences to be empowering, it could also be dangerous and put me in a vulnerable position. I was under scrutiny for talking about my personal experience with sexual harassment. My mental health plummeted while I dealt with the backlash online in what I thought was a safe space. Suddenly I didn’t feel brave or empowered about my drawings and painting studies of my nudes, I felt vulnerable and judged. Its a hard balance to make such vulnerable paintings and works of art and also being strong enough to put it out there and not be phased by other peoples opinions. It knocked me back and I couldn’t continue looking at my body and myself as subject matter. I didn’t feel empowered. Maybe that would be something that comes back with time when the situation at hand faded. Or maybe I wouldn’t be comfortable in myself for a long while.

So I began to think about where I could go next with the female gaze and I thought it would be interesting and new to look at the male body through a female perspective. We see women all the time through a male gaze that sometimes its difficult to distinguish between our own point of view and our internalised male gaze. Women are sexualised, commodified for male consumption. Where as men are interesting characters, if they are flawed it is for good reason. There is usually substance to men in media where as women are mostly to be seen, ‘Men act and women appear’ as John Berger says. So what are men through a female gaze? That’s what I wanted to look at next.