Danielle Orchard

Her Brooklyn studio is filled with artworks of female figures relaxing on beaches, in parks, and in baths. Distinguished primarily by the bright colors and bold lines, her paintings depict the often nude female form in varying, familiar poses: smoking a cigarette, drinking wine, or arms crossed, brooding and exhausted. Although they are seemingly at leisure, “the forms used to compose these settings are tense and anxious,” she says. “Each character is distracted and directed by a sense of being watched, and yet each fails to live up to the viewer’s expectations. They mimic art history, but they remove the deflated eroticism of their idealized artistic ancestry.” It is as if the color, beauty, and fun in her works try to cloud the circumstances in which the subjects find themselves.

Orchard is interested in the role that drama and performance play in the everyday emotional lives of women, and how those dramas can often disappoint and contradict the inherited notions of life as a woman. “I’m interested in how this disappointment can be celebrated, how it humanizes and complicates representations of women which have classically lacked dimension and complexity,” she states. “My painting language is most influenced by the layered space and fragmentation of Analytical Cubism, and I use that to express my lived experiences of feminine physicality and emotion.”

<Read the full essay from Issue Two>