Cool eye, hot colours
Published Saturday April 3rd, 2010
Stephanie Weirathmueller has a clear memory of being at the grocery store checkout as a child, looking at row upon row of glossy fashion magazines and admiring the beautiful women on their slick pages.
She still loves magazines, but it's partly with a painter's eye that she view them now.
Her latest series of 14 oil paintings are drawn, to a large extent, from high-fashion imagery.
"It was exploring this idea of identity, with these images of this girl growing up, and ideals of beauty and fashion, and how those things form an identity, but with them there's also a sense of losing yourself," she says from Fredericton.
Her stance is less critical than observational.
"I think it's a reaction and a critique, but not an aggressive one," Weirathmueller says.
"In these ideals there does exist some form of beauty that I admire, but I think that identifying with it, I felt maybe a bit trapped by it, too."
Identity has always been central to her art.
"I think that my work is auto-biographical, it's all referencing experiences and a lot of it has had to do with looking at personal history and family history, and that's kind of what's closest to me."
It's also a matter of painting what's in front of her. That's the case for this show, which opens Friday at Gallery 78 in Fredericton. Images were drawn from magazines and books, as well as her family album. The idea for the show emerged organically.
"This isn't the series that I thought would happen, but this is what came out," she says.
Initially, she was thinking about identity as it relates to the intimacy of daily routines, including her own morning ritual of getting dressed and maybe putting on makeup.
"It just kind of stayed there," she says. "It just didn't go beyond that, and then it became a body of work."
She worked on one or two paintings at a time, then went looking for more images.
"It was building up slowly, one after another."
She isn't married to the images as she finds them. She plays with composition and colours.
"That's one of the pleasures with paint, being able to choose what colours you have."
She revels in the technical parts of the process.
"You forget the image, you forget the idea and then you're just painting, and then it's just about the chemistry, and I really enjoy the chemistry of mediums and colours."
The chemistry between images is important, too.
"When I look at them I think of a film, and what scene is going to follow the next scene"‰..."‰Each painting is building up to the next one. I really was trying to think of things in terms of an abstract video where you just see random images."
There are other images in the show besides those of girls and women, including birds.
"There's something about that randomness that is kind of freeing, too, so while I was doing the work I was open to including other images," she says.
But that yellow budgie isn't a red herring: it still relates to the show, she says.
"I think that I approve of them because they seem to go with it, too, because of the colour and the showiness of them."
- Kate Wallace, Telegraph-Journal
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