women and food
Women and Food | Lee Price
In a series of oil canvas paintings, Lee Price examines the nature of compulsion and yearning through the lens of hyperrealism.
Compulsion: because consumption is always surrounded by desires, apprehensions, guilt, and calculations.
Yearning: because it is our most powerful mechanism for narration. Yearning, for we are nothing if not vectors of craving.
The women in my paintings are seeking a place of solace, a re-acquaintance with joy.
Price painted these oil canvases in 2009 to depict stolen moments of women taking solace in food; inspired by her own complicated relationship with eating disorders. Some have, however, interpreted her paintings as an exposition of a comfortable and liberating relationship between a woman, and the food she eats. Either way, Price’s series reeks of familiarity in language and comfort in solitude. You can see apology or you can see recovery. What matters is perspective.
Everyone has something around food. Lee's narratives are nested- she makes a personal exploration into compulsive behaviour. Food, for her, is a symbol for so many distractions women create to keep themselves from being present in life.
Anorexia and Bulimia aren’t as contradictory as you think. Starving oneself means resisting an endless longing and binge eating means submitting to it. Love can do that to you too - plunge you into an extremity that seems like a dark place of solace. It is revelatory. It is compulsive.
The inclined figures sometimes open their eyes and look half directly towards the viewer. They are non-confrontational, not worried about their acts of consumption. Their minds and appetites are elsewhere.
Melodies for my Muse
We're bidding farewell to, among other things, August, with these melodies -
Skinny Love by Bon Iver
Messages from Her by Sabrina Claudio
'Nora writes a ballad in her basement' by Clairo
Never be the Same by Surf Rock is Dead
Only by RY-X
