"John Curin"

Written by Boris Staci
Published by Barry N. Abrams, Inc, 2003

The book catalogued John Curin's career up from around the 80's, portraying his ideas and Thoughts on his own work. I feel John Curin's ideas are loosely based around the idea of humour. His style is very much classic and controlled. He has never used modern techniques, Yet there is a beautiful abstraction in his works, which I feel makes light mockery of the Subject. A fluid distortion within the figures he draws. He spoke in the book about his works Being a "metamorphosis" of the past and the present. A merging of the two, both "exhausted categories". Today’s nudes are pushed to be perfect and slim. Tall and slender. We now have diet pills, surgery or even image editing programmes in which we can achieve these goals of perfection. This idea pushed him to produce quite contrasting ideals. Extremely large women, with sagging flesh. Large, voluminous breasts and hips, elongated thighs. Skinny figures, deathly thin.

The book gave me a thought as to how it compared with my photography task. The theme I had chosen Was 50's horror. Something glossy. Something glamorous. Something synthetic and made-up. My Female model was chosen by her slender, full figure. I did not choose someone of a larger frame however, because I felt that it would spoil the idea of the plastic dream world that older films Of their time produced. I needed to play on the thought of stereotypes, and even my 'killer' was of a large dark frame, towering over the 'damsel in distress', of which was a curly blonde, had red lips and long black eyelashes. Thinking of the mere facial expressions in the heat of a murder scene always leaves a smile over my face, because I see an element of humour, and over-exaggeration, compared with today's modern films.

Curin was bringing this to our attention when it came to magazines and mass media. Movie stars and celebrities were made up to be perfect, and everyone wished to be just the same, setting ridiculous goals to become something of a clone. This high contrast for me, made the humour in his paintings come alive. This is what intrigued me the most. The realistic way he paints made the images seem real. True to life. The meaning being that not everybody is picture perfect. We all accumulate flaws over time. And this will never change throughout any society.