Galina Dargery, beauty and body image

The figurative paintings are representations of beautiful, sensual women who take total pleasure in food, specifically desserts, with no regret or guilt, finding in food the joys of comfort, satisfaction, and tantalizing sensations.

Far too many women today who are obsessed with beauty and body image forget the primal pleasures and how food can comfort the soul. The women in these paintings fully embrace the pleasures of the moment, with no bolemia, no anorexia, and no guilt. They are happy, fulfilled, wonderfully sensual women embracing the delicious gifts of life that go beyond mere sustenance. They accept and revel in their desire for food, and in their acceptance abandon themselves to pleasure. For the viewer, they seem temptresses. There is always an aspect of the Garden of Eden in the paintings.While many foods can be sensual, desserts are an extravagant form of temptation, and the beautiful women in the paintings are unafraid of those temptations.

In some of the work the atmosphere is straightforward, a woman about to eat or being fed food. In others, there is a surreal element, dreams of childhood pleasures perpetuated in their adult desire for desserts, as in Proust’s tasting his grandmother’s madeleine. The desserts engage all their senses and emotions, sometimes even when forbidding, which only adds to their appeal.

I seek to infuse my work with a way of engaging the viewer with both evocatively sensual and powerfully commanding paintings in which desire draws on both innocent pleasures and irresistible temptation.

Galina Dargery
Dec 21, 2013