"Losing Teeth"

Spencer George. Losing Teeth. Acrylic Paint on Illustration Board. 2015.

This is a painting done as part of my independent concentration, something tentatively titled "Beauty Is Harsh". I am looking to study the correlation between beauty and the grotesque, and take iconically beautiful images and then destroy them, giving them elements of the horrifying, in order to demonstrate the human attraction to dangerous things. To do this, I decided to paint "perfect" pink lips, and then have the teeth, which are often shown in magazines as gleaming and white, rotting and falling out. The effect is unsettling, since we have been taught that a perfect pout will also have perfect teeth. My goal in doing this is to teach people that there is no true perfection, or beauty, and that what is beautiful can also have ugly elements. Nothing is black and white beautiful or grotesque- rather, they each share elements of the other, which is essentially what makes us human.