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| Beatrice Boyle standing next to one of her creations. |
She does this by "[painting] over images of models to distort the message of consumerism in contemporary fashion magazines" according to the web site for her art, "Dazed". She claims to have an obsession with magazines, which is what inspired her creativity with this kind of art. She would rip the pages out of fashion magazines and distort them with the goal of altering the meaning of of the models in the magazines from being "a commodity to a work of art"(Dazed). She then began photographing the models herself and using her own pictures to distort and paint over.
I find Beatrice Boyle's art intriguing, especially since it is coming from such a young artist. I am curious as to why, having graduated from a Fashion University, she would end up defacing (in a sense) that very thing which she became so immersed in. Perhaps it was because she was able to see the true colors of the fashion industry and the ways in which is corrupt - eating disorders of fashion models, to give one example - and was searching for a way to express this dislike for the culture of modeling. The fact that she paints over these photographs is in itself a way of defacing beauty and the idea of visual perfection of the human body. Regardless, I think that this is a brilliant form of art and one that I like quite a lot. I also see a relationship between the art of Beatrice Boyle and that of Nancy Burson (I wrote about her earlier in this blog). They both have found a way to express the concept of beauty and ask through their art what beauty really is and how valuable it is in the consumer world.
What makes Boyle's work so strong is the way she combines two completely different mediums (photography and paint) to create an entirely different generation of art. The message she gives through them, that fashion is like a string puppet of consumption, strengthens the art even more. To me, this is reflected a lot in the way that she seems to consistantly "scratch out" or sadden the eyes in her artwork.
Links to photos:
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