art ltd. magazine
West Coast Art + Design

Susannah Bettag artist profile
January 2007 issue

Combining heady images of female sexuality derived from pornography, and cartoony, childlike fantasies of her own invention, San Francisco-based artist Susannah Bettag creates paintings from a highly personal, and distinctly female, point of view. “In the time since I’ve been painting, the attitude toward pornography has changed. I think because of its general availability on the Internet,” Bettag says. “With my work, I’m not looking for shock value. You don’t see that part of the work immediately. I like that.”

“Even though I’m a feminist, my work is not necessarily feminist,” she observes. “It’s as much for me as for men. Although it’s all taken straight from pornography, the images that I picked are about my fantasy, too. I find them formally attractive.” Although Bettag herself is married with a child, her works only include images of women. “I tried a few paintings using men in them, and it suddenly brought in a whole new meaning, questions about dominance and what the roles are, that I didn’t necessarily want in there.”

Originally trained as an illustrator in Great Britain, Bettag came to San Francisco to get into web design at the height of the dot-com craze. It was only in 2000 that she decided to pursue her own art. “When I started out, I was toying with ideas about personal fantasy: not just sexual, but also fantastical, as in fantastic worlds, fantastic creatures.” Among the fantasy elements she references are “childhood worlds, unicorns, fairy tales: both nightmares and dreams.” One recurring creature is a character she invented called Little Boo, which “had a cuteness about it, an innocence, but also was a bit disturbing and a little strange, and I’ve definitely played that up.” Another favorite subject of hers is vegetation, mushrooms and spores, which are presented in a way that is at once goofy and exaggerated, and oddly sexual.

In a series of early works, Bettag painted sexual images on paper lunch bags, presenting them as a sort of takeout fast-food commodity. In her more recent paintings, Bettag employs realistically rendered, close-up images of female friend’s faces, which she depicts in an ambiguous state of either happiness, or ecstasy, it is hard to tell. Then she layers other pictures on top of these images, usually line drawings of women engaged in sexual acts, and patches of characters or vegetation, creating a complex shifting between the various planes, both visually and thematically.

Bettag’s first solo show at Frey Norris Gallery, titled “Vanitas Baby,” will include new paintings as well as a large sculptural installation made up of 3000 of her “Little Boo” characters, which will be suspended from the ceiling in a 10'- tall column, “in a shape like the top of an hourglass, spilling down into a heap on the floor.” The show’s title alludes to a culture of vanity and superficial beauty, but also to the genre of 17th century Dutch still life painting. “They’re about the brevity of life, the passing of youth and beauty,” she reflects. “The Dutch ‘Vanitas’ paintings had specific symbols in them: skulls, candles burning down, hourglasses, flowers with petals falling down, books with pages turning. All of the Vanitas themes I’ve been appropriating in my own work,” she adds. “There’s skulls in there. I’ve done them in pink, like candy skulls.”


Susannah Bettag's Vanitas Baby will be on view at Frey Norris Gallery in San Francisco from February 1 to March 14, 2007
For more information, call (415) 346-7812

art ltd. magazine, Dec 2006
by George Melrod

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