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Julie Oakes
Quercia Stories
Renaissance, Sensuality and Feminism
Beauty, obsession, passion. All these describe the
work of artist Julie Oakes. An artist who sees herself constantly in a state
of flux, Oakes has moved from the traditionally based format, which has
informed her works for the past years, toward a new format of text and
image.
Quercia Stories intentionally references the techniques
and concerns of Renaissance art. Over the past three years Oakes has drawn
from the Metropolitan Museum collection in New York City as a ground for her
writing. She derives from the collection, yet moves away from mimicking a
style, and brings the works into a contemporary framework. The materials
used are the traditional media of past generations. Specific references are
made to techniques of the Renaissance period: parchment paper with sepia,
indigo or black pencil, canvasses prepared with rabbit-skin glue, Bologna
gesso, and natural pigments. In the paintings, meticulous renderings from
Renaissance works are overlaid with strange and romantic imagery, at once
obfuscating and revealing. In the drawings, excerpts from Quercia
Stories, appear lightly on the page. They are difficult to read and
follow. The writing is overlaid on the Met drawings with yet another layer
of drawings obscuring the cursive writing. Within the universal symbols of
love and eroticism the artist develops a personal, visual vocabulary.
The influence of the Renaissance features prominently in the
work of Julie Oakes. It was a time of great change in European society.
Artists were no longer strictly confined to religious painting. A return to
classical subject matter and exploration of myths and stories presented a
challenge to the artist's imagination. Not bound by fact, imagination became
more important than historical reportage, and figures could move freely in
space.
Oakes's choice of the artist's name Titian, or Tiziano in
Italian, is compelling. As Oakes has stated, she could have chosen Michael
Angelo, or any other Renaissance artist, however Titian embodies the kind of
work which people easily recognize and often associate with an artist of a
particular stature: the definitive artist’s name. Although in the stories,
Tiziano is a musician, rather than a painter, the parallel can be drawn
between Titian’s work and the works of Oakes. For example, in Titian's
masterpiece, Bacchus and Ariadne, the fable of Ariadne is portrayed,
deserted in the Naxes by Theseus, who is “startled from her melancholy” by
the advent of the young, handsome Bacchus, the god of wine and revelry, and
his crew. Like Quercia Stories, presented to Oakes’s North American
audience, which tells the sensuous stories of the contemporary characters,
Justine, Tiziano, Angelo, The Dane, My Editor and the other ‘lovers,’ one
can appreciate the stories and the visuals without knowing the exact
references. William Gaunt, in his book Painting and Graphic Art,
describes the painting: “The contrasting movements of Ariadne and the young
Bacchus leaping from his chariot impart a tremendous buoyancy and lightness
of feeling... while the general plan of form and color is so bold, the
subject gives Titian freedom to introduce a multitude of beautiful details:
a splendid landscape distance, animals in beautiful coats, a sly faun in
whose hair the artist has minutely painted a white flower.” Similarly,
exotic and fantastical creatures such as monkeys, lizards, rattlesnakes,
dead bunnies and gargoyles appear in surprising and odd places throughout
the works of Oakes, referencing historical and geographically exotic places.
There is a Bacchanalian sensibility in some of the works included in this
collection of drawings, paintings and stories.
The Renaissance was a period in which the discourses of
representation, sexuality and morality were beginning to meet in
representations of the female nude. One intriguing female Renaissance artist
emerged during this time (1559), Sofonisba Anguissola, a gentlewoman who was
encouraged by her father to pursue her studies in art and who was a
contemporary of Titian, Michelangelo and da Vinci. Anguissola's profane
portraits were highly regarded, however Anguissola's age and sex prevented
her from engaging in an aesthetic dialogue which revolves around the
Napoleonic concepts of the metaphoric relationship between paint and beauty,
the earthly and the sublime, the material and the celestial. Other female
artists, appearing slightly later, such as Elisabetta Sirani (Portia
Wounding her Thigh, 1664), and Artemesia Gentileschi (Judith Decapitating
Holofernes, 1618, and one of the works that Oakes has used as a reference
for her painting Coons), drew more freely on the classics and mythology.
(Whitney Chadwick, Women, Art & Society) The Napoleonic influence on
sixteenth century painting further instilled ideals of form and classical
concerns. “In his Theologia Platonica, Marsilio Ficino had argued that
physical beauty excites the soul to the contemplation of spiritual or divine
beauty. As painting began to record a more sensuous ideal of beauty, writers
like Agnolo Firenzuola, author of the of the most complete Renaissance
treatise on beauty, published in 1584, described the preferred attributes of
female beauty. The description of the noblewoman with fair skin, curling
hair, dark eyes and perfectly curved brows, and rounded flesh recalls a
number of paintings of the period, including many by Titian.”(Whitney
Chadwick, Women, Art & Society)
In these works, Oakes searches for the 21st century perfect
form: male and female, the images projected are idealized. With the addition
of images of woman's lingerie, the traditional, conservative view of female
sexuality, where the female is on display and adorned for the pleasure of
the male, is illustrated most evidently in the series of drawings. Here, a
leg is measured, exposed and presented before a fully dressed male; a mask
hides an identity, real or imagined, and is removed. The difference is in
the confidence of the women, for both Justine, the 21st century
confessor of Quercia Stories, and Julie Oakes, who tells Justine’s
story are women acting as full and participating partners in the process,
both in sex and art making. Unlike female artists working in the Renaissance
period, Oakes is free to explore her own sensuality with confidence and a
lack of embarrassment.
The bed is an image clearly charged with sexual, political and
sociological symbolism. Quercia Stories are tales of beddings.
On first reading, the overall images are layered, yet they are also often
broken down into fragments, reconstituted, and scaled toward the intimate.
Erotic references from historical works, Victorian illustration, East Indian
Tantric paintings, or Japanese erotica offer titillation, with contemporary
images such as the provocative stiletto, lacy underwear, lipstick or the
feathery fronds of an artist’s brush balancing the collection with a less
specific representation of sensuality. The freedom of literary expression,
the strong, graphic presentation and the artist's confidence in handling her
materials works well with the duplicity of the imagery: romance and threat,
life and death, love and its absence.
At once feminine and masculine, hard-edged and soft, Quercia Stories,
as a whole, text and visuals, captures the enigma that is the often tenuous
and volatile relationship between human beings.
Susan Brandoli
Director/Curator,
Vernon
Public Art Gallery
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