JANE RADSTROM

Jane Radstrom is an artist who considers her work to contemporary realism, in this series she wanted to focus on the nuances of body language and expression. 

"It is important to me that the girls are presented realistically, showing unidealized beauty and what I think of as a modern sense of confidence in candid moments, I hope that when you stand in front of a piece you can feel the presence of the person depicted.'

In my opinion I don't think she's done this, I feel as if she has done what I had unconsciously done on my shoots, created something that a man would have done. Although I like this idea of movement - something I could possible try with my own work - I feel like you don't look at the images as 'expressing candid moments' rather you look at them as if the females are teasing the males, the men are watching them, the women are putting on a show. Of course it's hard to say this is what's happening, as you can't see that from the painting, however this is how they make me feel. This is something I wouldn't want to have in my images, I don't want them to connote anything sexual and I feel that these do. 

I feel the same about the image below also, in fact I feel worse about this one. Although you can understand the female depicted is beautiful, sexual, natural etc. Which are all things women want to be portrayed as. I still feel that this is very much aimed at men. This could be used to make women uncomfortable with themselves. Although the tones of the art work are helping to decrease the sexual connotations, its the actual position of her body that stops me from straying away from this notion. You can definitely see the confidence but I wouldn't say she has successfully shown 'unidealised beauty'.