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at this point in my project, I did a lot of primary research I wanted to experiment with different materials in order to find out how and which different materials translate the different feelings the tights give, smooth or rough surfaces, linear mark-making, or taking rubbings, dry scratchy brushes or painting using more solvent than usual.

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i further explored an old project i had done looking at different ways in which i could translate a distorted view of the body, however following a tutorial i realised that these pieces weren't as personal as i had wanted them to be and therefore decided to focus more on my other ideas and leave this project to be picked back up at a later date 

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i further explored an old project i had done looking at different ways in which i could translate a distorted view of the body, however following a tutorial i realised that these pieces weren't as personal as i had wanted them to be and therefore decided to focus more on my other ideas and leave this project to be picked back up at a later date 

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primary research, testing out different colour pallets influenced by Naudline Pierre 

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primary research, testing out different colour pallets influenced by Naudline Pierre 

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(i explored this route but ended up letting it go as i preferred my other ideas)

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(i explored this route but ended up letting it go as i preferred my other ideas)

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influenced by Luchita hurtados 'I am' series 

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influenced by Luchita hurtados 'I am' series 

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influenced by 'body black void' by Jana Euler 

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influenced by 'body black void' by Jana Euler 

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I'm taking photos influenced by jana Eulers black body void painting as I want to experiment with perspectives and the viewpoint I have of my body in a literal sense

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after my work reacting to my negative self-reflection in the shower, Looking at luchita Hurtados work had influenced me to try to think of natural points in the day in which I'm subconsciously self negative due to the pressures put on the female body by society and specifically the male gaze, I didn't want to force or fake this as I wanted my work to be as genuine as possible and relevant to my current routines it took me a few weeks to realize that I had an odd relationship with tights... when I squeeze into tights in the morning I feel thinner and more put together, when I was young around 13 I was introduced to support tights (basically really uncomfortable tight tights to suck in the fat tissue on your legs), this made me realize really how young I was when the male gaze was affecting my daily routine

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"being inside the experience of femaleness"
"and taking possession of it"

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Hover to Zoom

Joan Semmel (b. 1932). Sunlight, 1978. On view at the Jewish Museum in New York (The Jewish Museum, New York)

Joan Semmel (b. 1932)

Sunlight, 1978

On view at the Jewish Museum in New York

Great Works, In Focus
Perspective Discussion of news topics with a point of view, including narratives by individuals regarding their own experiences

Joan Semmel painted her own body from an entirely new perspective. Her own.

Hover to Zoom

Joan Semmel (b. 1932). Sunlight, 1978. On view at the Jewish Museum in New York (The Jewish Museum, New York)

Joan Semmel (b. 1932)

Sunlight, 1978

On view at the Jewish Museum in New York

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May 19, 2021

Joan Semmel kicked off the 1970s with two series of brightly colored paintings depicting heterosexual couples having sex. No commercial gallery would show them, so Semmel rented a space in SoHo to display them.

By the end of that decade, which saw the cresting of feminism's second wave, with its rallying cry, "the personal is political," Semmel's work was still focused on the body and it continued to carry an erotic charge. But the style was more photographic, the colors more realistic (brown skin tones rather than screeching pinks and greens) and the overall atmosphere a little less hot-and-heavy.

This beautiful, large-scale 1978 work, " Sunlight," at the Jewish Museum in New York, is a prime example. Born in 1932, Semmel was (and is) a feminist. She wanted to make work about "being inside the experience of femaleness," as she put it, "and taking possession of it."

But how do you do that, exactly?

First, she seems to have decided, you wash away the encrustations of cliche and idealization that, over centuries of male image-making, have obscured or distorted women's felt reality, their experiences of their own bodies. You try to see with fresh eyes.

Semmel worked with a camera, learning from modernist photographers whose use of fresh vantage points (subjects seen from above, from below, from odd angles) opened doors onto new sensations of reality. Here, the vantage point is both strange and deeply familiar. It is, quite literally, her own. That's to say, the painting puts the viewer more or less in Semmel's position as she looks down on her own body. It's surprising to have to acknowledge that there's something genuinely novel about this.

But Semmel brings more to "Sunlight" than novelty. The composition is a miracle of taut, contending energies held in gorgeous equilibrium. The two parallel diagonals of her arms work at cross purposes to the light-drenched zigzag of her jackknifed thighs and calves.

The meeting of foot and wrinkled hand in the picture's top right corner is brilliant. Each extremity extends toward the other through a different spatial plane. But somehow, through the mechanical miracle of rotating joints, their soft meeting - palm touching sole - feels like a fated union.

In the picture's lower half, breasts, hair and nipple fold and swell in a bosky zone of shadow-casting shapes. Nothing is illegible or obscured - that is clearly a thigh, this is hair, those are breasts - but everything in the picture is made to feel at once authentically frank and genuinely foreign.

Or, if you are a woman, perhaps, intensely familiar. And that's just it. As a man, I feel the oddity in Semmel's "Sunlight" - the strangeness of seeing a woman's body from such an unfamiliar perspective. But I, too, am a human animal, with folds and nipples and wrinkles; I have looked down on my own body; I have felt sunlight on my skin.

Love and desire are always navigating unpredictable riptides where the familiar meets the strange, and where self-love mingles with our yearning for others. I suppose we can thank art, and painters like Joan Semmel, for continually intensifying this invigorating churn.

Great Works, In Focus

A series featuring art critic Sebastian Smee's favorite works in permanent collections around the United States. "They are things that move me. Part of the fun is trying to figure out why."

Photo editing and research by Kelsey Ables. Design and development by Junne Alcantara.

Press Enter to skip to end of carousel
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Cy Twombly, Synopsis of a Battle (Primary Title)

Yes, your kid could (probably) do this

Charles L. Sallée Jr., Bedtime

This Black American artist was born to 'transport gladness.' The French accent came later.

Marisol, Mi Mama y Yo

Marisol lost her mother as a girl. She never sold 'Mi Mama y Yo.'

Caravaggio, The Denial of Saint Peter

The special intimacy of betrayal

Ducreux, Self-Portrait, Yawning

Joseph Ducreux posed mid-yawn for this popular self-portrait at the Getty Museum

Emperor Huizong, Court ladies preparing newly woven silk

A master of art, a disaster on throne

Piet Mondrian, Broadway Boogie Woogie, 1942-43

Late in life, Mondrian wanted to get down and boogie

Joan Semmel, Sunlight

Joan Semmel painted her own body from an entirely new perspective. Her own.

End of carousel

Sebastian Smee Follow Sebastian Smee is a Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic at The Washington Post and the author of "The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals and Breakthroughs in Modern Art." He has worked at the Boston Globe, and in London and Sydney for the Daily Telegraph (U.K.), the Guardian, the Spectator, and the Sydney Morning Herald.

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Perspective | A fresh look at the female body undoes centuries of male gazing

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Hover to Zoom Joan Semmel (b. 1932). Sunlight, 1978. On view at the Jewish Museum in New York (The Jewish Museum, New York) Joan Semmel (b. 1932) On view at the Jewish Museum in New York Great Works, In Focus Perspective close Discussion of news topics with a point of view, including narratives by individuals regarding their own experiences Hover to Zoom Joan Semmel (b.

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I found using oil pastel lightly creates a feeling of discomfort/ itchiness of tights 

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I found using oil pastel lightly creates a feeling of discomfort/ itchiness of tights 

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I find this piece the most successful in my work as the way I have rubbed the charcoal across the paper really captures the dimensions of the legs and material of the tights . I also like the composition  

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I find this piece the most successful in my work as the way I have rubbed the charcoal across the paper really captures the dimensions of the legs and material of the tights . I also like the composition  

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I found this splatter of charcoal in this piece successful and want to attempt to recreate this in other pieces

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for this piece I took inspiration from Naudline Pierre painting, the way she uses a single/ a couple of block colours however still adds dimension using brush work, when you look up close all her brushwork is accurately dimentional 

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for this piece I took inspiration from Naudline Pierre painting, the way she uses a single/ a couple of block colours however still adds dimension using brush work, when you look up close all her brushwork is accurately dimentional 

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I used thin layers on of acrylic paint using a dry brush to create this almost shiny effective of the tights I thought this worked really well and plan to create a bigger piece using the same technique 

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I used thin layers on of acrylic paint using a dry brush to create this almost shiny effective of the tights I thought this worked really well and plan to create a bigger piece using the same technique 

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in this piece I experimented using brown oil paint initially then adding charcoal (same technique from precious drawings) but then adding white spirits onctop of the charcoal to create the smooth surface the tights cover the skin with 

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in this piece I experimented using brown oil paint initially then adding charcoal (same technique from precious drawings) but then adding white spirits onctop of the charcoal to create the smooth surface the tights cover the skin with 

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what makes us individual is not only our bodies but what we do with our bodies, how we dress them, paint them, treat them, abuse them, look after then, upkeep them

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I wanted to put together a physical body of work showing a 'starter pack' sort of thing showing in depth how I treat my body, I wanted to lay our how I dress my body with jewellery clothes, the things I carry in my prockets the extensions I wear n my hair, I wanted to take this further showing what I wear on my body; my fake tan, my makeup my moisturiser, hair gel, the food I eat, what I drink, my nail varnish etc

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if everything that your body has naturally created, what is biologically you disapeared, what would be left

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exploring skin tones with a limited palled, two shades of pink and a white oil stick

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feedback from my crit: these drawings where interpreted as intrusive rather than personal, they translated more of an idea that someone was invading my private life, this isn't what I'm trying to translate so to change this I want to try and capture my viewpoints from only my eye downwards and not using my whole head to hopefully capture a sense of my view rather than an onlookers view