Referencing Art History

One that really flashed into my mind is The Luncheon on the Grass by Edouard Manet: two men, clothed according to their gender in the center of the picnic, relaxed and holding court, and an additional figure, a woman, starkly nude and unbothered right next to him.

I thought of these bodies, the clothes they wore, and how they held themselves, and I saw how gender performance physically shaped bodies in this social space. This is what inspired The Garden Party (2024), an illustration I made that reimagined this iconic art piece. Here, I brought the implied dynamics of gender of the original painting to the forefront, by subverting the iconography on the original piece: the clothes, the postures, the gazes. In the garden, no one is perfectly and comfortably positioned to one side of the spectrum; rather, both “man” and “woman” use the originally presented iconography to twist around these presentations. The final figure, the faun, serves as the complete middle, not man, not woman, but a body in its natural state, in all its glory.