Contextual Response

I was drawn to the lecture ‘Straws of Sickert’ by Michael Aierman due to its representation of women in conversation. Sickert painted sex workers in domestic spaces. Sometimes they are nude, sometimes clothed, talking together or alone, but never quite humanised. Ajerman spoke about how Sickert’s Camden Town Paintings and his Chatterbox series are conversational pieces. In a literal sense, the figures are talking, or appear to be in an atmospheric moment of horror while also being in conversation with referencing life and the harness of it. The conversational element of his work struck me. For example, in A Marengo, Sickert’s use of dry brush and quick energic movement feels like the flow of a conversation. Elements of the underpainting are coming through as though the conversion between the women is disjointed and fractured: eloquently understood by Virginia Woolf ‘Sickert is a great biographer, said one of them; when he paints a portrait, I read a life.’ (Woolf. V, 2012) While a life is easily read on the canvas, I do not read the woman as clearly. These women haven’t been humanised in their depiction, instead, appear monstrous. The figures are constrained, with planar composition which forces attention onto those depicted, although their faces are blurred and impossible to read, creating a sense of ambiguity. This work makes me consider the notion of subject versus. In this instance, when reading Sickert’s paintings, his women are objects. Although his depiction of women combats the notion of ‘model women’ (Brines. J and Mackie. S and Robinson. and Stevenson, 2016, P.3) and as Aierman describes, represents real women’s bodies that aren’t idealised, he has depicted many of the women in his Camden Town Murder series as dead, cold, and passive. These gritty depictions of dead women glorify violence towards women and feels unkind to the subjects, turned objects represented by his brush.

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