Monumental portraits unveiled at the Sunshine Coast Arts Centre last week provide a stark retort to the notion that women become invisible as they age. Painter Carol Schlosar — based in Sicamous, making her Coast debut — opened her show of two-and three-dimensional works, Pages from the Book of Women, at the Sechelt gallery accompanied by three generations of her family.
During fine art studies at Thompson Rivers University, Schlosar became preoccupied with a glaring omission. “European art history has tremendous sins,” she said, “and one of the largest sins is that women are ignored. And older women are represented as matriarchs or saints or cautionary tales about excess and madness.” This led to stereotypes that ageing women are unstable and threatening — or “utterly dismissible,” according to Schlosar.
Her rebuttal — in the shape of the Women in Red series — is rooted in first-hand research. Schlosar interviewed 20 women artists aged 60 to 80 (“their third age,” she explained). One by one, she pressed them for answers: how do they feel about aging? How are their own artistic practices evolving with the accumulation of years?
Words and phrases from their answers are immersed in the sanguine backgrounds of close-up composites, painted in black and white from fragments of low-res selfies snapped by the subjects. In each image, four faces become fused into the picture of indomitability. Subtle indicators of age are there, if you look hard enough — silver tresses, care-lined brows — yet the expressions rendered in acrylic and gold leaf are unabashedly regal.
Exaltation and specificity are vital, explained Schlosar. “Throughout the ages, portraits always defined whether you’re important, whether you were worthy, whether you are a role model,” she said. “If you had a portrait taken, you were there for posterity.”
In her acrylic painting Three Graces, she subverts Raphael’s 16th-century trio of alabaster-skinned nudes. Instead of nubile handmaidens lost in contemplation of fleshy fruit, three mature women are depicted as acolytes of balance, wonder and full-throated hilarity. Rather than portraying women as ethereal ideals, Schlosar paints real women — whose own emphatic ideals imbue them with power.
The figures of Three Graces share a trait with Schlosar’s Invisibility portraits of women over 80 (the oldest subject is 92). While faces and hands remain crisply defined, bodies recede gradually into the richly-hued backgrounds. It’s a reflection of comments she heard from women that she interviewed, who felt the gravity of a tacit societal diktat: age augurs anonymity.
The transfixing gazes of her fully realized faces — the imperious Jean, ruminative Alice, luminescent Amy — shatters that prejudice. Painted near life-size, each one provides viewers with an opportunity to make sustained eye contact with women whose innate strength demands attention.
During senior’s day at a big-box retailer, Schlosar queried shoppers about their euphemisms for aging. The typeset results are festooned around black-feathered corvids in her twin works Crows by Any Other Name. The scores of terms include super-adult, sunset years, relic, witch.
“In almost every language, there’s a word for dark bird that describes older women,” Schlosar chuckled. “In English, it’s crone, and I actually love it. Crone is a great word and crows are great images for talking about older women: I want to jump up and down for no reason every once in a while, and get really noisy when things are shiny, when my friends are around.”
Schlosar’s collection of portraits, crow studies, and inscribed handbags remains on display at the Sunshine Coast Arts Centre until April 17.
