Cui Xiuwen, Cindy Sherman, and Frida Khalo are all female portrait artsits. Each one has their own style; however, there is a similarity in the context/concept of their pieces and what they wanted to convey.
Cui Xiuwen does portraits of an Asian girl that is pregnant. She puts her model in different poses that we might see a pregnant lady in; scared poses, mood swing poses, etc.. To me, this series, Angel, is of a subject that Xiuwen probably feels strongly about. Teen pregnancy is probably a growing issue in China and we can only question how that makes them feel. Xiuwen tries to show us how these girls may feel in her pieces. They are scared, indecisive, and feel alone. I find this concept really intriguing about her work. Even in the pieces that contain the model many times, she is still portrayed as lonely. Lastly, I found it interesting how in every piece the the model is wearing white, the color of purity.
Unlike Cui Xiuwen, Cindy Sherman does portraits that are morbid and have dark lighting. Also, where Xiuwen used a model for her portraits, Sherman used either herself or mannequin and prosthetic parts. Cindy Sherman started her career by putting herself in feminist "cliche" poses. Once she ran out of cliches to use, she moved over to using more grotesque imagery. She likes to explore what we may view as disgusting and find beauty in it.
Lastly, Frida Khalo used her portraiture to challenge boundaries. She used shocking images to reflect her unstable life. Her pieces are said to question nations, the role of women, and religion. Her early paintings are done in oil and are are naive in the sense that she used bright colors to paint flat forms.
Each artist had a different style and portrayed diverse images. However, regardless of the diversity in each artist, I found one common theme within all of them. This theme is finding the beauty in the ugly, or an ugly situation. Teen pregnancy is a difficult situation to be in and Xiuwen shows this in her pieces by making the model look sad and alone. However, looking at the piece the viewer feels sorry for the person in the picture and realizes that she needs to be loved to get through this rough time. Even though the situation is a bad one, the subject is still beautiful and needs the love that we all do. Cindy Sherman wanted her viewer to find the beauty in her morbid imagery. She picks disturbing images and uses a dark scene to make the viewer really look into the piece and find what is so special about it. To me, she does everything she can to make the image look really harsh and gross at first glance; to make the viewer almost want to look away real fast. However, I believe that if the viewer looks long enough, they will begin to see tiny aspects of the image that make it stand out in a beautiful way. It may be the bone structure in the face of a dead body, or a dress a strange figure is wearing, but I believe it is there if we choose to find it. Frida Khalo used images to shock her viewer as well; however, these images are meant to portray the beauty in overcoming hard struggles throughout her life.
I found these artists really interesting in their own way, but I enjoyed finding the a common thread that linked each one together as well.
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