Title: VENUS
Date: 2017
Medium: pen (staedtler pigment liner) on paper (Fabriano)
Dimensions: 56 3/4” x 73”
VENUS is a 6 foot pen drawing. Its an abstracted image I drew from a photo I took of my girlfriend laying in our bed. I snapped the photo impulsively one day and then felt compelled to draw the image life size. By composing the image initially from a birds eye view then drawing it upright a kind of floating figure ground relationship was immediately created. The spatial ambiguity is compounded by my choice to leave out of the drawing, the bedding and other information in the photo. This is not a demure and idealized image of a woman but one that depicts a more true representation of a woman simultaneously at ease and in power in her own space and time. It wasn’t until I decided to show the work to the public, that I decided to title it VENUS.
Title: VENUS
Date: 2017
Medium: pen (staedtler pigment liner) on paper (Fabriano)
Dimensions: 56 3/4” x 73”
“Kristy Perez’s Venus is an important and brave work, what Perez calls a Venus for our time. This nearly life-sized pen drawing is featured in Feminine/Feminist at Cinnabar Gallery in the Blue Star Arts Complex. The exhibition, which features 11 artists, explores the intersection between femininity and feminism.
Meanwhile, Sandro Botticelli’s Venus (about 1484-1490) is in the United States for the first time, featured in an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. This is not Botticelli’s famous The Birth of Venus on display in the Uffizi Gallery but a later, lesser-known work. Context is important: Botticelli completed his life-sized rendering of the goddess of love before the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola came to power. The year 1497 marks Savonarola’s infamous Bonfire of the Vanities, when cosmetics, musical instruments, mirrors, fancy clothes, and paintings of nudes and pagan subjects were burned.
Our current political climate is nowhere near as severe, yet it takes brave acts like Perez’s to keep the fires at bay. Perez drew her girlfriend while she was asleep in their bed, hair strewn and body sprawled over rumpled sheets. She’s in slumber’s unguarded pose, that vulnerable place we let ourselves go to when we’re with someone we trust. This drawing may be something that the public might never had seen but for the artist’s decision to share it. In this sense, Perez is also trusting – and testing – the audience. Certain sections are rendered in great detail while other parts are left blank, letting the viewer complete them with imagination.
This intimate portrait is a sensual, honest, devoted recording of her lover’s body. Every groove and voluptuous curve evokes the body as a living, cherished and sacred place. Without the intimacy shared between them, the drawing would feel voyeuristic. Instead, there is a powerful emotional charge fueled by the tension between the artist’s very awake, roving hand and the unconsciousness of her lover.
(...)
In many of the historical precedents to Perez’s Venus, the subject’s private parts were covered, another issue of control, making the female subject appear shy and reticent. Yet Perez’s bold rendering channels a natural feminine pose that evokes a feminist power. ”