Artist Ana Benaroya would rather talk lesbian desire than the female gaze.
A few years ago, Ana Benaroya received what she considers the ultimate compliment. “Saw this young artist’s work recently,” the renowned painter Katherine Bradford wrote in an Instagram post about one of Benaroya’s paintings. “Now have to completely rethink nipples.” It was, Benaroya recalls when I stop by her studio in Jersey City, “the ideal validation.”
“In many ways, I feel like my art is often the opposite of how I am as a person,” Benaroya, 36, says. “I’m pretty quiet, not in-your-face. I can be very shy. And these characters I paint, there’s nothing bashful about them. Their bodies exist exactly as they want them to. Their limbs have no limits; they have no shame.
The more we talk, the more I wonder what Benaroya thinks about a phrase frequently associated with her work: “the female gaze.” She’s ambivalent, but it prompts her to consider a more nuanced question. “What does lesbian desire look like?,” she asks. “That is a particular gaze. I'm not sure how to define it—it’s very indefinable, and often invisible. And that’s something that maybe can be encompassed in the female gaze. Maybe not, or maybe just a small part of it.
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