Not all artists who paint breasts are interested in them as sexual objects, but their erotic associations can be hard to shake. In 2020, American artist Sarah Slappey, 39, exhibited a series of surreal canvases in which disembodied arms, creamy lozenges and liquid tendrils collide with pink petal breasts resembling long balloons, complete with puffy areolas and noodle-like, upturned nipples. Some breasts ooze drops of milk that turn into strings of pearls. Slappey, who painted these works after bottle-feeding her nephew at night for several weeks, reflected on the transformation of nipples after childbirth and the mingled pleasure and pain of being in a woman’s body (she compares it to a “cupcake full of thumbtacks”). Still, viewers were quick to read the tangles of pink limbs as erotic. “Maybe in our language we don’t have enough separation between eroticism and sensuality or touch and the body that people just overlap them too much,” says Slappey. “Or people just like sex.” Frustrated, she took a temporary break from breasts to focus on ankles and hands.
British artist Somaya Critchlow, 30, who depicts black women with thick hair and pneumatic breasts in compact oil paintings infused with warm earth tones and jewel-toned shadows, similarly expressed her annoyance at the reading of her work in one note. “People try to position my work as sex positive or political or whatever – and it’s not, it’s just investigative,” she told The Guardian. Her subjects may lean back or bend over luxuriously, squeezing their breasts like pin-up girls, but they also tend to exude a strong sense of inwardness—mixed states of ambivalence, mischievousness, and desire that make them whole human beings. Providing them with exaggerated breasts is a provocation for the viewer to go beyond the obvious. “I’m just going to blow this up as big and dumb as possible,” she told a journalist, and still “turn it into a serious painting.” And what can you tell me about that?”
Larissa De Jesús Negrón, 28, renders breasts more realistically than some of her peers, using airbrushed acrylics and soft pastels to create subtle color transitions, but she also speaks in her work of the ways I can transform. Raised in a devout Christian family in Puerto Rico with what she describes as “really hard rules that revolve around being humble and not showing too much skin,” she began painting nude women as a rebellious teenager. Soon it became a form of therapy. “I was able to process a lot of the self-loathing and shame I felt around my body, and nudity in particular,” she says. Now based in Queens, De Jesús Negrón portrays herself, in all-consuming periods of worry, periods of serene self-acceptance and ambiguous moods somewhere in between, showing off the nipple hairs her mother once told her to pluck. In “Soy Libre Mami” (2023), a close-up of a single breast in shades of green and mauve, the curled strands form cursive letters that spell out the first two words of the title. Translation: “I am free.”