Looking at the Female Gaze in the Paintings of Caroline Walker
TeXT By Beth McKenzie
Caroline Walker, Threshold, oil on linen, 2014
The first Caroline Walker painting I encountered was Dandar Bathers. It’s a small painting, just bigger than an A4 piece of paper; a far cry from the life-size window paintings we have now come to admire from the Scottish artist. Despite its small stature, I found myself beguiled by the work, hypnotised by the figure who stared out from its centre. It was almost as though I had been caught pulling back the curtain to peep at the women peacefully enjoying the warm immersion pool. The ambient soft lighting, the expressive brushstrokes, and the dreamlike quality of the pool setting, all felt terribly intimate. It left me wondering: ‘should l enjoy looking at this?’
Caroline Walker, Hot Tub, oil on linen, 2017
Relationships of looking have long been a point of intrigue within art. Most aptly termed the ‘gaze’, our awareness and perception of others and oneself has become a conceptual mainstay in contemporary art criticism; so ingrained in the cultural lexicon that it has almost become self-explanatory. Preface ‘gaze’ with an identity category and all of a sudden you have a brand new concept. Amongst the many examples are queer gaze, colonial gaze, postcolonial gaze, and white gaze. It’s gaze, gaze, gaze as far as the eye can see.
Caroline Walker, Rear Windows, oil on board, 2017
Despite many variations over time, the gaze is still most readily associated with gender. Unsurprisingly termed the ‘male gaze’, gendered concepts of looking most often refer to the uneven relationship between representations of women and their presumed male audience. To save us from examining dry Lacanian psychoanalysis, we can trace the origins of the ‘male gaze’ in art criticism to John Berger. In Ways of Seeing, a series painfully familiar to many students of art, the beloved art historian famously stated that ‘men look at women’ whilst ‘women watch themselves being looked at’ (Berger, 1972). This admittedly simplified sentiment coloured much feminist art criticism from the 1970s onwards.
But it was in cinematic studies of the mid-1970s that the male gaze became a truly developed concept. In her landmark essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Laura Mulvey argued that whilst women are constantly confronted with their own image, what they see is not reflective of their own unconscious fantasies, fears and desires. In her theory, the pleasure derived from looking is split into a one-way dynamic of the observed and the observer, an imbalance of power in which the former is feminine and the latter is masculine. According to Mulvey, the female viewer is excluded from the Western visual culture that prioritises male pleasure. This concept of course met with criticism. Queer theorists notably critiqued the failure of the male gaze to account for non-heterosexual, non-cisgender perspectives. Other critics, such as philospher Bracha Ettinger, addressed the theory’s psychological limitations and suggested an alternative gaze that went beyond the masculine-feminine divide, laying the groundwork for what we may term ‘female gaze’.
Caroline Walker, Beauty Queen, oil on board, 2016
As this oppositional concept has entered the popular conscience, however, it has become detached from its original intentions. Despite valiant efforts to venerate women against the marginalising nature of the male gaze, Internet personalities have begun to reinforce the very same limiting structure that the female gaze originally sought to push against. Popularised on TikTok (the graveyard of nuance) the phrase has now come to denote an idealised “feminine” aesthetic supposedly unconcerned with satiating male sexual desires.
Think Mia Goth over Megan Fox, baggy jumpers over tube tops, and Glossier over Anastasia Beverley Hills. Rather than posing as a true alternative to the male gaze, this warped version of the female gaze instead re-establishes the imagined binary that led to women’s subordination in the first place. Though participants may truly believe that they’re upheaving patriarchal values, most who take part in this trend actually back women even further into a corner and, worse still, continue to appeal to the male gaze. What began as a feminist call to action has become further confirmation of Mulvey’s original pessimism that women can never truly escape the men’s perception of them.
Caroline Walker, Rear Windows, oil on board, 2017
But then we return to the lonely bather. In her case, the boundary of spectator and subject remains intact. She cannot choose how she is presented or perceived. Her appearance has not been curated to appeal to some idealised version of femininity. Though she is painted by a woman, her rendering retains a sensual quality in line with the voyeurism inherent to the male gaze.
In the vein of the female impressionists before her, Walker paints quiet scenes of women’s everyday life such that you cannot help but view her work under the, admittedly ambiguous, lens of the female gaze. Often painting family and friends, Walker’s intimate exchange with her models is inkeeping with the tradition of historical women artists such as Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, and their much-overlooked peer Eva Gonzalès, charging her works with an even greater intimacy. She still engages with vouyerism, maintaining a boundary between viewer and subject, but does so without overt reference to her subject’s sexuality.
Caroline Walker, Dandar Bathers, oil on board, 2015
In Dandar Bathers, the warm oranges, the glow of the pool, the softness of the oil paint all envelop our subject so much that we too feel submerged. In this way, her works still titillate despite lacking an overt sensuality. Instead, one could make the case that Walker’s painting is characteristic of a female perspective that, yes, involves looking but also appeals to the tactile sense as a means of inducing or perhaps even giving permission pleasure.
Dandar Bathers reminds me of a favourite painting of mine by the aforementioned Eva Gonzales, A Box at the Theatre Italiens. It too produces a similar sensuality, with its matching curtain, dark palette, and rich textures. More significantly, the paintings share a female subject who appears on equal footing with the viewer. They do not bow entirely to the will of the spectator’s gaze nor are they eschewing sensuality in the name of ‘femininity’. Nor does the viewer’s enjoyment of the scene rely on their domination of the subject. Instead, pleasure is derived from feeling evoked by the artist’s harnessing of the senses. Where women have been denied authority over visual pleasure, Walker and others have instead leaned into a visual language that extends beyond the eye and into the body.
Eva Gonzales, A Box at the Theatre des Italiens, oil on canvas, 1874
Political readings of Walker’s work are still underpinned by the enduring idea that it is radical for a female painter to revel in the pleasures of looking. Gorgeous as they are, Walker’s paintings expose a stagnation in feminist art criticism. In an exhibition titled ‘A Female Gaze’, her work was presented alongside the work of Laura Knight, an artist who worked primarily in the early-twentieth century. The two were said to be ‘united through their observations of women in everyday life’. That the political potential of the female gaze still boils down to female spectatorship - in other words ‘doing as a man does’ - being a revolutionary act is enough to leave you reeling. But perhaps the true promise of the female gaze lies not in looking as a reclamation of power but, as Walker’s work so brilliantly captures, an enjoyment that doesn’t have to be at someone else’s expense.