Original Art By Caitlin Stewart | Ugallery.com

artist statement

In my work, I have consistently dealt with the juxtaposition of attraction and repulsion. For an entire year, I was obsessed with painting saddles and other western imagery, enjoying their suggestive, organic forms. In the last year, I discovered that the same qualities I was attracted to in saddles were also present in meat, and a new obsession developed. I set out to juxtapose more explicitly the attractive and the repulsive, the violent and the demure, the lurid and the expected, and the masculine and feminine. I saw it as a celebration of these contradictions. I liked the fact that a single image could make people hungry, and at the same time cause others to become disgusted, considering vegetarianism. Additionally, I was interested in the sexual connotations of meat, which often make people uncomfortable. I had long been interested in the human form because of its organic, erotic shapes and I saw the meat as a stand-in for the human body.

I also began to see my work as a celebration of meat, and food in general, as something that brings people pleasure. I am an avid carnivore and enjoy finding beauty in something that others view as grotesque. However, I also see my work as an expression of a deeper human struggle between resisting and indulging in material pleasures. The meat becomes a symbol of this indulgence. Through my use of subtly suggestive images, humor, and a vigorous exploration of material application, I have explored my own inner struggle as an individual. Within this struggle, I have tended to go back and forth between abstraction and pictorial work. I usually base my initial compositions from a few different photographs and then let my imagination take the lead from there. In my exploration of meat as a subject matter, I initially studied the works of Chaim Soutine and the early Dutch still life painters. During the more abstracted works, I often looked at the work of Willem De Kooning and Cecily Brown. In the later, more abstracted paintings, there seems to have been a shift in focus. The paintings have become more about the shape or idea of meat and less about its role as a food.