Cressida Transformations

Cressida's Transformations - art and photography


Portraits. The artist transformed herself into some of the 20th century's famous and infamous women for this unique collection of portraits.

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"20th century woman" - collection of portraits, transformations,Cressida, Notman,women, art photography, glamor, Marilyn Monroe,famous women, infamous women, shop dummy, Mrs Pankhurst, Mata Hari, Ruth Ellis, beautiful women, Vita Sackille-West

20th Century Woman

A collection of portraits

Send a request for a biography of any of the subjects in this collection to:

editor@cressidastransformations.com

Adopting the name Cressida allowed the artist to relax her own ego and to distance herself from her subjects. For the photographs in this collection, she transformed herself into each of her subjects. She absorbed their pain and anguish, loves and hates, their fights for emancipation …

She became 20^th century woman.

Each of the 35 portraits in the collection is a combination of photography and painting. The photograph represents reality as seen with the eye and the painting depicts the images of emotion transformed into shapes and colours. The following are a few of the portraits in the collection.

Above: "Hannah's Mother"

"Lesbian Love"

"Despair"

"Fantasy with the Masked Man"

The collection was completed over a period of ten years. After it was finished in the late 1980s there were two exhibitions then the collection was dispersed. Where possible the artist reposed each portrait to its place of provenance. This meant travelling from New Zealand to Europe then to America and Australia selling some portraits, donating others and destroying the remainder.

It could be said this was the ultimate in self-indulgence. Only photographs of the portraits remain. Yet the artist regards this excursion as the culmination of her artistic life’s only worthwhile achievement -

20^th Century Woman - a collection of portraits.

Individually, as works of art, the portraits are of little value. Collectively, they give an insight into the mores, failings, and achievements etc, of 20^th century woman. The artist knew some of her subjects. A few are of herself - her own painful experiences - while others are of women whose lives she researched.

Above:

"Shop Dummy - impervious to pain"

"Purple Patch"

"Votes for Women"

Kathleen Notman, born in England in 1929, is Cressida. The collection received criticism when it was first exhibited from those who could not come to terms with the fact that Notman, both visually and emotionally, portrayed each of her subjects. She was accused of narcissism.

Because of this, after the collection was dispersed, she spoke of it no more until the latter part of the 1990s. It was in 1999 that she published an article “THE ARTIST’S MODEL”. It first appeared in a university magazine (City University of New York) and caught the attention of other publishers. As she says, Cressida is the artist’s model yet there is a Cressida in most women - women who envy a beautiful shop dummy that is impervious to pain … women who have secret fantasies … Today, Kathleen Notman is less reluctant to talk about her work. She hopes that it provides an insight into the female psyche and how art tells its own story.