I have identified as a perfectionist for as long as I can remember. This does not surprise me. I am a Virgo - the stars foretold that I would live a life of nitpickiness and look at the world through critical eyes.
This last year, however, I have tried to overcome my desire to be perfect and instead embrace the perfectly imperfect, as suggested to me by my amazing career coach, Michelle Ward. This approach has led me down an exciting path, including showing my art work at both the Spring and Winter One of a Kind Shows here in Toronto, hosting my own studio party (with more to come), and getting prints made of my work. However, perhaps the biggest accomplishment for me this year has been finishing the piece that I have been nurturing (and stalling on) for years - Shellacked (The Perfectionist).
Shellacked (The Perfectionist), oil on linen, 42 x 50”
For years now, I have wanted to paint myself climbing out of a giant bottle of red nail polish. The idea first came to me months after I started therapy. I woke up one morning and suddenly envisioned a painting where I was covered in nail polish. It spoke to the perfectionist in me - a glossy, red, sexy enamel that could hide all of my flaws and imperfections from sight. However, there is also a danger inherent to that kind of beauty. While such a glossy coating may be alluring, it is also toxic, unsustainable, and fragile. I also thought of how a perfecting enamel could function as an armor to hide a woman’s vulnerabilities and individuality, amalgamating her with other women while simultaneously creating yet another unrealistic beauty standard.
There were several sources of inspiration for the piece. A lover of Dita Von Teese and her burlesque performances using super-sized props, my nail polish idea felt reminiscent of the giant martini glass in which Dita both strips and baths while on stage.
Dita in the martini glass. Image taken from: https://dailytoole.com/2016/02/21/dita-von-teese/
The idea also made me think of luxury beauty brands like Tom Ford and Chanel, taking me back to the advertisements and pictorials that I used to love to look at in Vogue magazine when I was a teenager. In fact, as a teen I taught myself to draw and paint by copying fashion advertisements, some of the best artistry that I could get my hands on. In my household, we did not talk about the art of the old masters. I found my inspiration in more contemporary sources.
This is a drawing I created when I was 16 or 17, copying a Calvin Klein advertisement for Eternity. It still hangs in my studio.
With this background, I am not surprised that I ended up creating a large piece of art that simulates the kind of advertising that I once loved to pour over and copy. However, I did not think of painting Shellacked as a mock beauty advertisement until December 2018, several years after I first had the nail polish idea. And then I did not actually begin the painting until February 2019, since I “needed” time to “perfect” the cartoon.
This is the final cartoon that I used to transfer the image and text for Shellacked (The Perfectionist).
Striving for perfection has been slowing me down for awhile with this piece. Shortly after I first had the idea to paint Shellacked, my internal perfectionist was triggered. I created a colour study that I did not like, and then painted a head study that I also did not like. I was also baffled by the concept of how to paint myself and make it look like I was actually covered with nail polish, realizing that it would be impossible to stage in life. I improvised by pouring nail polish on a Barbie doll to try to understand how nail polish would shine on the body’s contours.
My Barbie muse alongside my first head study.
After a few frustrating attempts, I realized that I did not yet have the chops to paint Shellacked the way I wanted to, and so I put my project aside. I believed that I needed to know my craft better before I could execute my idea. And so I took a break for more than a year while I tried to learn how to paint.
When I finally returned to Shellacked this year, my desire to achieve perfection led me to experiment with how to paint a giant bottle of nail polish, how to make the torso in my painting look truly glossy, and how to best paint text. Most of my work was a matter of fixing my initial attempts to capture my subject, a process of trial and error.
I now know that I recommend doing a straight transfer of text using charcoal - that is, if you are crazy enough (or nit-picky enough) to paint text! I tried two methods for transferring text. Initially I created my own frisket film stencil to transfer some of the text, tracing the text on to the film, cutting it with an exact-o blade, positioning the film on the painting with tape, and then painting on top.
Shellacked in the early days, with two home made frisket stencils taped on.
The entire process was tedious, time consuming, and difficult to control. I found that my paint would bleed under my stencil. I ended up re-working the text several times. Frustrated, I let myself take multiple breaks while creating the final version of Shellacked. (Full disclosure: I also took breaks because of many other factors, including moving studios this summer, doing a plethora of shows throughout the year, and also working a day job.)
Here I am at the Winter One of a Kind Show, re-working the text on Shellacked one last time.
For the text at the bottom of the painting, I did a simple charcoal transfer, which went much more smoothly for me. Then I simply painted on top of the charcoal lay-in.
Something that makes me especially proud of Shellacked (The Perfectionist) is that I actually finished it. The painting is not as perfect as it was in my mind prior to execution. The real thing is perfectly imperfect. And I can accept that. My experience actually reminds me of Ann Patchett describing her writing process in her essay “The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir about Writing and Life.” She writes:
For me it’s like this: I make up a novel in my head… This is the happiest time in the arc of my writing process. The book is my invisible friend, omnipresent, evolving, thrilling… This book I have not yet written one word of is a thing of indescribable beauty, unpredictable in its patterns, piercing in its color, so wild and loyal in its nature that my love for this book, and my faith in it as I track its lazy flight, is the single perfect joy in my life. It is the greatest novel in the history of literature, and I have thought it up, and all I have to do is put it down on paper and then everyone can see this beauty that I see.
And so I do. When I can’t think of another stall, when putting it off has actually become more painful than doing it, I reach up and pluck the butterfly from the air. I take it from the region of my head and I press it down against my desk, and there, with my own hand, I kill it. It’s not that I want to kill it, but it’s the only way I can get something that is so three-dimensional onto the flat page. Just to make sure the job is done I stick it into place with a pin. Imagine running over a butterfly with an SUV. Everything that was beautiful about this living thing — all the color, the light and movement — is gone. What I’m left with is the dry husk of my friend, the broken body chipped, dismantled, and poorly reassembled. Dead. That’s my book.
Shellacked is my dead butterfly. A thing of “indescribable beauty” in my mind, now describable by virtue of my imperfect attempt to paint it on linen and share it with the world. And so ends my quest to paint the “perfect” false advertisement. It is now time to move on and make other pieces of beautiful, interesting art.
I also created the following video to provide a bit of insight into the creative process behind this piece:
