Fat Bottom Girls

I first played around with this idea of girls with big legs back in college. I was doing a project for a Fabrications class. It must have been my freshman year. I don't even know where the idea came from except that I had started drawing bigger girls, and that I had been a caricature artist for so many years, it made sense to exaggerate the figure to me. The project was a mixed media, so i had a bunch of these wooden boards and I was really trying out different textures and possibilities. I remember just being obsessed and the images just kept coming out of me. It was a perfect expression of my love for fashion magazines, caricature, and my insecurities about myself. When I saw the girls come to life on paper, they were cool. While I had done them out of a place of insecurity, they became empowered. It seemed that these extreme contradictions ran through the work. Big legs/little upper bodies, insecure/empowered, satire/serious. SEE MORE IMAGES FROM THIS SERIES

I still revisit this idea, partly because I still think something is there that I haven't discovered yet, and partly because I just feel that the girls are me, or somehow offer me a stronger voice. These days however, I am really pushing it in all different directions. I have been working digitally because it is what I am interested in at the moment but also because I am using it as a means to sort out what these girls stories are before I put brush to canvas. This is a piece I started last week. I imagined it being an urban outfitters commercial.