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focusmachine In reply to MooseQuack [2006-10-05 07:30:54 +0000 UTC]

Thank you very much!

I choose the "well sculpted male" as the subject as a way of showing the effect of cultural ideas of beauty on the psyche of those who aren't necessarily fat. Choosing a fat subject would be too obvious, in a way, even though that fat person is just as capable of self-loathing as the skinny one (trust me, I know this first hand, being a portly gentleman myself). But the real tragedy of eating disorders and other irregular/dangerous behavior involving food is when such disorders strike people that are clearly not overweight/ugly. Because in them, it signifies a more severe image problem. When you have no logical reason to hate your body, when you don't need to improve it, and yet you still hate what you see when you look in the mirror, then there is a much more disturbing force at work, stirring your insecurities and causing that self-loathing. For the skinny that want to be skinnier, or sexier, or whatever, its stressing over one or two pounds when you already eat practically nothing and exercise all day. It's hopelessness.

I was trying to capture that sense of despair common to those of us with image problems, and using a model that wasn't fat (like me) was a way to make the painting more "in-synch," I suppose, with the average person.

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MooseQuack In reply to focusmachine [2006-10-08 03:01:35 +0000 UTC]

thanks for providing such a detailed responce, I think it shows a lot about the effectiveness of your work that a lot of what you had typed just confirmed what I saw in this series.

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