All images copyright Jazmin Gallegos. All rights reserved.
Beauty has become defined by two factors. What we think is beautiful and what society thinks is beautiful. A lot of the time these two factors coincide but they can also contradict. Aging is a beautiful thing that I find alluring. Real women with salt and pepper hair and deep set laugh lines, aging beautifully. Aging is a system we have no control over, although many of us go through unnatural physical and emotional pain to slow it down. In this new technological age, we would never see this woman in all her imperfections on the cover of Vanity Fair. I’m talking about my fifty-something year-old college professor who has written several books, displayed art in eight solo exhibitions and countless others throughout the country, founded an international artist collective, not to mention a Harvard graduate. These are the people who inspire my work as a painter. These people are the reason I choose to photograph, project and paint the figure in all of its raw beauty and flaws; because the body is what gives us ability, it is merely the facade.
I draw my aesthetic from artists like Robert Crumb who illustrate women in bold and assertive narratives, empowering women by painting them as atypical, confident and lively animated body building comic superheroes and pin-up models. The unconventional compositions of Philip Pearlstein’s crude female nudes are without identity, morphing into the objects in the space he allows his models to choose. The subdued forms of John Sargent’s subjects turns the feminine body into bizarre, gestural dimensions. These artists tell narratives through everything from the pose of the model, the surrounding objects and the quality of marks, lines and color. For Sargent, it’s his color pallet, for Crumb it’s his textured dots and vulgar body language, for Pearlstein, it’s his patterned rugs and oddly placed objects; toy planes, plastic animals and metal benches accompanied by bare-naked bodies. What I hope to achieve in my work is a sense of unity and mystery among the figures I choose to paint and the surrounding I find them in. I want people to realize my work is about the imperfect system of aging, the stages of life we as women experience, the juxtaposition of gender, and the performance it plays on our society. They will not just be a sought-out model for an oil painting, they will be survived women with real struggle, vitality, and anxiety.
