Susanna Coffey at Lyons-Wier & Ginsberg Gallery, through June 1
Susanna Coffey makes self-portrait paintings and drawings, and for the last six years that’s all she’s made. The 12 works at Lyons-Wier & Ginsberg are drawings in water-based media–watercolor, gouache, casein, pencil–on sheets that are about eight by ten inches. Most depict her head and shoulders against a pale background–her rendering of her studio’s wall–using shades of blue-gray and tannish orange or brown. These are not pretty pictures: her skin is heavily flecked, looking more weathered than the skin of the elderly–Coffey is only 46–with many visages so mottled they appear to be disintegrating, suggesting the decay of flesh after death.
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But her drawings aren’t simply grotesqueries. In Self Portrait Drawing (Small Red Head) the face is flecked with shades of flesh and tan and the hair with shades of orange and pale red. But the pale-gray background is also flecked with spots, darker and bluer, and it looks as if it’s been abraded away. (Coffey often rubs sandpaper on the drawings.) If the face is decaying, the background is decaying even more. This visual link between the face and the rest of the picture makes the face’s condition seem less a unique image of a particular person at a particular time than a truth about all flesh: however smooth-seeming, it’s subject–like everything else on our planet–to erosion.
About half of the 17 pictures by Alison Watt now on view at Belloc Lowndes are self-portraits. Receiving critical acclaim in the U.K., this 30-year-old Scottish painter is presenting her first one-person U.S. exhibit. At first I had mixed feelings about her work: her pale, clean surfaces seemed antiseptic, and I thought I saw too much art history in her echoes of Ingres, the Italian Renaissance, and the pre-Raphaelites. What started to endear them to me was their off-balance feel–in most there’s some object that’s not quite right; the compositions come alive as one begins to notice their quirkiness. Watt has said of her painting method, “I don’t map it all in. I always start with the eyes and work outwards. Each bit has to be finished as I go along.”
These themes all come together in a large triptych. In each picture, she stands facing us wearing only white shorts but displaying herself in a different way. In the first, Apple Eater, her raised arms hold a large white cloth that hangs in front of her, cradling a mass of green apples. Her head cocked to the side, her oddly elongated face wears a faintly pleasant expression. In one sense Watt is trying to make herself appealing, presenting herself as a creature of bounteous nature. But she hardly depicts herself as a conventional beauty. British critics have commented that she’s much better-looking in person than in her renderings, though Watt says her paintings “are idealized versions of me; my concept of beauty doesn’t include the classic rounded face.”
