Masters, master, masturbate (a master's debate) - relooking at the home, body and self through seventeenth century Dutch still life painting
The still life genre has been, and arguably still is, regarded as the lowest form of painting in Western fine art history. The absence of the human figure in still life painting means that the artist does not require knowledge of either human anatomy or history for the production of the work. Given seventeenth century female painters' exclusion from the academies where anatomy was taught, it was thus a genre regarded as appropriate for female painters in Europe prior to the nineteenth century. Such dictates of propriety were indicative of gender constructs that relegated women to the private sphere of society and the domestic environment. As an accompaniment to my Masters in Fine Art exhibition titled Masters, Master, Masturbate (A master's debate), this text explores what still life painting may reveal about the relationship between the home, the body and the self in the present day. Produced from my position as a contemporary, white, female painter of Dutch descent raised within an Afrikaner culture in the context of South Africa, I suggest that a critical reconsideration of this apparently constrictive genre offers potentially liberating perspectives of gender constructs and the female painter.
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