Body painting

I'm currently working on ideas about 17th century women painters - Artemisia Gentileschi, Sophonisba Anguissola, Judith Leyster. Painting wasn't supposed to be women's work - though many women probably knew how to grind pigments and mix paints for the man of the house - but these women took the brush up themselves, and created some very interesting paintings.

Their paintings are particularly interesting because they sometimes subvert what we're expecting to see. Anguissola paints herself - an act of triumphant self-assertion for a woman - and almost literally paints her teacher out of the picture. Gentileschi paints scenes of rape and violence that may derive from her own experiences - Susanna and the Elders, Judith cutting off the head of Holofernes. Judith Leyster shows women quiet in their own space at home, rather than in the tavern scenes that were so popular at the time.

But what interests me particularly about painting is its erotic potential. First of all, painting a portrait is immensely erotic in potential - to get to know someone so intimately, to look at them that hard, is an incredibly intimate experience.

Then of course you have the idea of actually painting someone else's body. Several interesting things here; the soft, wet smoothness of the paint and the tickle of the brush - directly physical feelings. The ability to change the look of the body - to wear a tiger face or a skull face, to change the colour of the skin, to accentuate and emphasise certain aspects, or to create a design that masks the body completely...

I'm remembering some of the 'happenings' of the 1960s in which artists took their naked bodies and used them to smear paint on their canvas... these weren't, as far as I know, erotic performances, but the idea is intensely sensual. And there's also something about imprinting your body on to reality - a way of preserving a moment, but also of honouring the body, something Western culture is not usually much good at.

So I think you can take it as read that when I get round to actually writing the novella, the paint will get all over the place - not just on the canvas!