What I learned when I posed for a naked pandemic portrait
Increasing numbers of women are choosing to have nude pandemic portraits painted, Aisling O Leary among them. Here she bares all.
16 February 2021 • 2:21pm
Like increasing numbers of women, Aisling had a nude portrait of herself painted
Credit: Christopher Pledger
It was late on a Saturday morning in early December when I knew I couldn’t put it off any longer; I’d have to get naked. To take a nude selfie - my first ever - and send it to someone I had never met.
Above my bed sits Modigliani’s painting ‘Female Nude’ so I found myself looking to her for guidance on how to pose. The sitter’s peace with her body is reassuring. But I didn’t want to be sleepily passive in how I presented my body, but rather completely awake and in control.
Tracey Emin has been saying goodbye since the moment she arrived. When she got her first gallery show back in 1993, at the newly opened White Cube, she christened it ‘My Major Retrospective’, convinced that between self-destructive partying and bouts of depression, it would probably be her last, too. Though the intervening decades have only proven her staying power, her art has continued to communicate a valedictory sentiment: from the sexual memorial of
Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 (1995) to the slew of titles that, like
The Last Thing I Said to You is Don’t Leave Me Here (1999), have read as telegraphic snippets from a never-ending breakup. Like the slamming of a door, her work conveys the desire to be off and away, and to be remembered indelibly in the process – while forever sneaking back, to see how the grand exit has gone down.
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