CMAppleton

American Beauty II

This painting is 48" x 60" and is done with acrylic, collage of printed material, my drawings, and misc. debris of all kinds. I am not sure it's done. I have wanted to put a figure near the top, drawn in as I did in American Beauty I. (AMI sold, and hangs in a boutique hotel's lobby in Maryland, despite the subtle pattern of tiny printed words which are all of the foul names women have been called throughout history that I could find on the internet -- I keep expecting a phone call with words like "Er, about that painting of yours, we didn't realize . . . our guests . . . offensive . . . er, misrepresented, . . . refund, . . .?") Like my first American Beauty painting, this painting deals with women's rights, body issues, etc. After doing a lot of research for this piece, it just felt sad to me that women, here and around the world, from present time to over a thousand years ago, have been trying so hard to make themselves thinner, prettier, more appealing, wanted; yet have often been restricted the right to education, freedom of movement, jobs, property ownership, votes, even freedom over their own bodies. Recently in the middle east a woman (another woman) was murdered by her own father for speaking to a man who was not her husband or father or brother. How do we, as western women, respond to that? It is beyond comprehension. Women have been controlled by not allowing them to learn to read, draping them in burkas, attaching chastity belts or slave bracelets, forcing circumcism, locking them up, physical violence, social alienation, the list goes on and on and is just so sad. Now I'm depressed and totally drifting off the subject. Well, the painting deals mostly with all the ways women try to make themselves younger and prettier, to be more of a contender in today's world ala the standards set by TV, movies, celebrity awe, etc. I was attempting to put all these things together, the advertising for the creams, the waist cinchers, the get pretty fast schemes, to show how ridiculous they all are.

Breaking Through to Blue

These six paintings were intended to be hung very close together, rather than as shown here. They are each ten inches by ten inches and I did them very quickly. I was trying to change my palette. I always use the same old colors over and over. My studio is filled with orange, red, yellow and smaller amounts of cool colors. I had to force myself to use mostly blues. These paintings all have deep sides and the paintings go around the edges to the sides. As I was painting them I would put two at at time together, and connect shapes and colors, select another two, and kept turning them and varying what I put side by side, in the hope that in the end all of the pieces would work together. Well, most work well together. I really loved doing them because it just felt right, came together, things were working plus I did a lot of drawing on them and that was fun. I am working on another blue palette painting now that's 48 x 48 and will also have a lot of drawing. It's staring at me right nowbut I have another painting in line in front of it so it will just have to wait it's turn.