The Catwalk Girl Keeps on Walking ,1999
Provenance : Lettie and Michael Gardiner Collection.
Exhibited : Standard Bank Gallery, Judith Mason: A Prospect of Icons, Johannesburg, 2 October to 6 December 2008. Sasol Art Museum, University of Stellenbosch, Judith Mason: A Prospect of Icons, Stellenbosch, 14 January to 28 March 2008.
Literature : Standard Bank Gallery (2008) Judith Mason: A Prospect of Icons, Johannesburg: Standard Bank Gallery. Illustrated in colour on page 69.
Notes : I’m completely in love with fashion, although I’ve never been drawn to wear any, thank God. I think it’s beautiful and a great art form, but there’s a perversion about it. I dislike the fashion of self-mutilation. I find it extremely disturbing and dangerous that a lot of models wander around with virtually nothing on the catwalk. It’s a flaunting. - Judith Mason Catwalk Girl is another painting which explores ageing. The colours here are disturbingly emotional. The figure distorted in space and body. Were Catwalk Girl an image of a very attractive, probably extremely slender, girl, it would be easy for us to see the colours as simply fashionable. Instead, they appear both violent and compassionate: shades of past glory once worn easily and a trumpeting of the destructive ageing process. Purples range through to orange-red over the vaginal area and radiate over the thighs. Background ranges from dark to violet and blue. Catwalk Girl has no arms, her torso has fairly heavy breasts. Her left leg slims down past a detailed knee; her right leg is painted at a disturbing angle: the knee bent inwards and the lower leg, before it too is cut off, further distorted – rather like a 60s cult figure (think Twiggy) with her emaciated legs and knobbly knees. No longer a figure of glamour, she is moving: no model’s face, the general area of her genitalia disturbingly highlighted upwards to below the stomach, in colours burning bright. No tiger, tiger here but a dowdy middle-aged woman. Using the title’s contemporary allusion to models, of whom our culture makes legends of beauty, the painting bears compassionate witness to ageing: even golden girls must turn to dust. - Lorraine Chaskalson
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