Del Kathryn Barton - The Ladies Network (Copy)

It seems like a woman can’t paint a nude portrait of another woman without having her sexuality or stance on feminism called into question. People’s attention tends to go towards the nude, rather than the figure: it must be a statement; she must be trying to tell us something; it must be for the male gaze because why else would a woman paint another woman’s breasts?

When the painted woman has multiple breasts and an assortment of male and female genitalia, viewers can get so caught up in the sexuality of the piece that they miss the point of the work entirely.

inside another land #20, archival print, 2016, by Del Kathryn Barton

Del Kathryn Barton – woman, mother, wife, and two-time Archibald Prize winner – paints these women. Perhaps “women” is the wrong noun here – the figures are noticeably female, though not entirely human. They are vixens who occasionally sport a penis. They are regal dames who stare past you with a somnambulant detachment, their eyes clouded over in a narcotic fog. They are ethereal wood nymphs with translucent skin, huge liquidy eyes and outrageous hair. They are covered in breasts, vulvae, feathers and scales.On the surface, the works are definitely sexually charged, so you can’t blame someone for questioning the symbology as long as they also look beyond it. Talking to a journalist at The Australian, Del insisted that talking about the sexual content of her work reduced the symbolism.

“I wish there was a broader word,” she had said. “It’s a lot about me trying to be open and okay with being vulnerable. And whether it’s a nostril or an ear, they’re all orifices. It’s about the emotions, life, love, giving and receiving.”

Underyling her psycho-sexual paintings is a deeply-ingrained connection to nature that is often overlooked. The multi-breasted intersex figures dominate the canvas and often appear to be engaged in sexual acts with their animal familiars.

On closer inspection we see that they are literally bonded to their environment by entwining tendrils and vines, and their facial expressions imply a sexless temperament more reflective of the human/animal bond than the act of intercourse between species.

But where there are boobs, there are questions about their purpose. Del recently took part in a Q+A at one of Insight by The Office Space’s monthly discussions titled, ‘The Commerce of Creativity in the Australian Art Scene’. After a few questions about her childhood and motherhood, the focus turned to the sexual nature of the work.

The host, Naomi Tosic, asked why Del’s figures are nude: are they meant to “push our buttons?” She questioned the appropriateness of the nudity: is it “acceptable because it’s beautiful?” She called the audience’s attention to how great it was that the women weren’t showing any shame in being nude (wait, should they have been?), but also weren’t “overly smutty or trying to be sleazy”.

Del politely and swiftly deflected the presumptuous nature of the questions and responded by explaining that her works are a celebration of the masculine and feminine nature of the female form.

“It’s about being exposed and being present in that moment,” she explained. “It’s not necessarily just about a physical nudity, it’s about one’s true self being as much on the surface as it can be, and living to one’s fullest potential. [It’s about] what it means to inhabit a woman’s body, which is such a complex experience.”

Del’s work always traverses the feminine. Alongside her paintings, Del explores the feminine psyche through photography, embroidery and most recently, film.

When I called Del she was in the middle of editing her new film titled Red. Starring Cate Blanchett, the film is about the sexual cannibalism of the female redback spider; a brazen celebration of female power – which is exactly the kind of thing you can imagine Del working on so early on a Thursday morning.

i would rather be nothing, acrylic on linen, 2016, by Del Kathryn Barton

Del has been working in film alongside her painting practice for about four years. Her last film was an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Nightingale and the Rose, that featured Geoffrey Rush, Mia Wasikowska and Sarah Blasko. It won the Film Victoria award for Best Short Film, and Del was awarded Best Director by The Director’s Guild.

For those unfamiliar with the story: the nightingale sacrifices her life so the man she loves can be with the woman he loves. The nightingale impales herself on a rose thorn and sings as her blood flows into the stem. The nightingale dies but a red rose blossoms. The man offers it to the woman of his desire, but she rejects him and he decides to give up on love entirely.

The nightingale and the redback spider are at opposite extremes of feminine power: one sacrifices everything for unrequited love, the other asserts dominance with poisonous venom. Del’s work usually inhabits the space between these two extremes. Her work affirms myriad aspirations and desires that exist in a woman.

I asked Del if she is painting aspects of herself:

“Definitely,” she said. “I’m an artist who is moved to make work about my experience of life. I would very rarely quantify the work as being directly autobiographical, but I am a very earnest and sincere artist and I can only really feel engagement in something that is very meaningful to me and feels true to my experience of the world.

“A lot of the time [the work] is about what it means to inhabit a female body and at this stage of my life, moving into middle age, there’s been so many different experiences of that body, which I find, does really inform the journey of the work.”

Nowhere is this more apparent than in her 2008 Archibald-winning self-portrait with her two children. The work, titled You Are What is Most Beautiful About Me, A Portrait with Kell and Arella, catapulted her into national conscious. The portrait shows Kell and Arella standing between Del’s thighs – emerging from them – as she stands as the defiant protective mother. It’s a portrait of the nexus between mother and child, illustrating the lifelong physical and psychic bond between autonomous lives. I asked Del how motherhood affected her artistic practice:

“It just catapulted me into a completely new universe that I couldn’t have anticipated in any way,” she beamed. “It really shifted my experience of my body, I started painting for the first time in 10 years, there was a lot more colour that suddenly appeared. I was so dizzy in love with my son, I just couldn’t have even imagined a love like that being possible.

“I just felt like the work became a lot more reflective of the actual life-giving place that I was in…I feel like I was drawing from more a feeling of abundance and a complete reappraisal of what my body was capable of, so it had a lot of magnitude.”

It’s this magnitude that viewers are denied if the only thing they see when they look at Del’s work is sex. Her strong female archetypes – the lover, the priestess, the earth mother – are undisputed matriarchs who represent motherhood, nature and the feminine.

In saying that, it’s also important not to look too far past the sexual impulses that are woven through her work. After all, that is part of being a woman too. In 2008, Del’s Melbourne dealer said some clients wanted “a Del Barton but they don’t want tits or vaginas”. I asked Del how she felt about this kind of censorship. Without hesitating, she responded: “It makes me want to paint more and more nipples and more and more vaginas!”

inside another land #38, archival print, 2016, by Del Kathryn Barton

This article originally appeared on The Ladies Network in July, 2016.
Images courtesy of Del Kathryn Barton.

Main image: angel dribble, acrylic on linen, 2016.