The Girl with the Getaway Face Explication
Having grown up reading the writing of Mickey Spillane and John D. McDonald, I have long admired the brazen ladies on the covers of crime novels. Even though my reading tastes have broadened, I still read an occasional murder mystery. Recently I came across a reference in a mystery wherein the cops referred to a beautiful woman as having a “getaway face,” implying that she was so attractive that she could literally get away with murder! When I read this I immediately recalled the noir novel covers of my youth. And since I had been gifted with several yards of orange canvas (reclaimed when the local Ulta cosmetics store replaced their aging canopies), it was a short hop to envisioning a dramatically lighted female face that seemed to tell a story of its own.
Captured mostly in contrasting yellows and oranges, my pop art portrait screams with chiaroscuro and whispers of mystery. Lit only by a single candle, the woman’s face is indeed lovely, with an exaggerated wide-eyed innocence that is perhaps somehow at odds with the conspicuously large, mulit-faceted ring on her finger. Her jeweled hand is held near her face as though to make sure the ring is illuminated, and her index finger is deliberately placed beside her mouth in a somewhat disingenuous pose, almost as though she is shushing the viewer, while effectively leading the eye upward to her ripe lips and lushly lashed eyes.
It is the push/pull of opposites (light and dark, innocence and guile) that creates tension in the portrait and leads the viewer to wonder what the subject has to hide and what she is willing to reveal and manipulate in order to do that.
Captured mostly in contrasting yellows and oranges, my pop art portrait screams with chiaroscuro and whispers of mystery. Lit only by a single candle, the woman’s face is indeed lovely, with an exaggerated wide-eyed innocence that is perhaps somehow at odds with the conspicuously large, mulit-faceted ring on her finger. Her jeweled hand is held near her face as though to make sure the ring is illuminated, and her index finger is deliberately placed beside her mouth in a somewhat disingenuous pose, almost as though she is shushing the viewer, while effectively leading the eye upward to her ripe lips and lushly lashed eyes.
It is the push/pull of opposites (light and dark, innocence and guile) that creates tension in the portrait and leads the viewer to wonder what the subject has to hide and what she is willing to reveal and manipulate in order to do that.