Artists use their personal aesthetic to transfrom reality to create meaning in the body of work.
Michael Zavros and Lucien Freud have incorportated this technique so that they many challenge many aspects of the modern world.
LUCIEN FREUD uses his personal aesthetic to challenge what is considered to be beautiful (e.g the images used in magazines for marketing purposes)...he intentionally gives the complexion of the human figure a 'rawness' and he had exadurated this by using the elements tonal contrast, directional brush stokes and creating texture with oil paints.
The Lucien Freud painting of supermodel Kate Moss. -->
"It might seem incongruous for Kate Moss to end up in a Freud painting: His aesthetic, so redolent of the miserabilist, earnest, existentialist postwar period in which he came artistically of age, seems a far cry from the slick, trashy, ephemeral pop culture epitomized by the cult of celebrity models. But Mr.Freud is ever the slumming lord of high art, socializing with teenagers and all the while vying with the old masters." Art News Blog
This painting is challenging the ideology that supermodels are flawless; this almost life size painting of a pregnant Kate moss is social-cultural protest against materialistic lifestyle everyone craves these days.
MICHAEL
ZAVROS- 'I do always seek to create something that is unashamedly
beautiful to look at, to behold. I also consider beauty as a concept. My recent drawings of models with their ideal features erased manipulates the notion of 'surface' beauty - the currency of the model having been removed. But surface is important not just as a metaphor but literally in terms of the treatment of the drawing material on paper. The portrait having been lovingly rendered in charcoal is then aggressively removed but the features can't quite be erased - the charcoal stains the paper permanently. It is always important to me that what I am painting or drawing is reflected in how I am creating it; technique and subject somehow mirror each other.'
In the Real Art World.
Just as Lucien Freud has transformed reality, so has Zavros although he has used his personal aesthetic to try and communicate a different message to the public. He has removed the most valuable aspect of a model, their 'currency' so that we are forced to look at and appreciate the finer details whilst wondering why the face has been removed.
