MARGARET BOWLAND
Beauty as Currency
So Barbie cakes are a thing that exists. A Google search turns up 155 million results. Pinterest has what can only be described as a visual record of every Barbie cake ever created. Someone has made one with prosciutto. Someone else has made one with artisanal cheeses and meatballs.
And even though a Barbie cake—a round dress-like cake decorated around the lower half of a doll—seems like something that was invented in the last decade, gift wrapped to every tween girl who asked for a princess-themed birthday party, the cake
trend actually stretches back decades into American culture.
“No bakeries were making them back then, but my mother made one for my birthdays. She took some pound cake, cut a hole in the center and put the Barbie down the hole,” Margaret Bowland says. “The doll would always be perfectly blonde and with blue eyes. I had darker hair and I always wondered if my mother wanted me to look more like the Barbie.”
In Bowland’s newest work, she has painted two pieces that examine the Barbie cakes of her childhood. Barbie Cake is presented as a diptych: on the left is an old black-and-white photograph of a 4-year-old Bowland posing proudly with her cake, and on the right is a female figure standing in the cake’s center, her hands gently running through ribbons of pink frosting.
“These pieces are very autobiographical. I used someone I’ve known all her life as a model because she could easily be a Barbie at her height with her long blonde hair. Through her I wanted to talk about the issue of beauty. People tend to think of
beauty as a form of wealth, but it also has attendant issues—people are gunning for you, trying to take you down a peg or two,” Bowland says. “For the picture, which was taken with an old Brownie camera, it’s all about neglect. I had taken and put coffee on the photograph and then lit it on fire with the birthday candles. That’s me burning.”
In Barbie Cake, Bowland is destroying an older version of herself and re-emerging, like a butterfly from its cocoon, transformed from within the cake. Although the transformation is magnificent, there is a sadness that permeates from within the painting of the photograph. Beauty came at a great cost.
Bowland has her own history tied into these works, but she has also laid a foundation for her viewers’ stories to build on with themes that include childhood, innocence, beauty and cake, Barbie-filled and otherwise. “I’m a storyteller—it’s the reason I paint,” she says. “When I started school in the early 1970s, we weren’t allowed to be taught the figure. Sincerity would be the third rail for most of my lifetime. I remember people telling me I couldn’t paint a figure unless I was doing it ironically or kitschy or in some way not of the world I was living in. But the soul wants what the soul wants.”
So she kept touching the third rail? “I have been all my life, honey,” she says.
In another new pairing of works, Bowland returns to that third rail with Mother and the Bride, a diptych of a woman and her mother. Her model from Barbie Cake returns as the bride, her face painted white and wearing a wedding dress in a bathtub. The white face paint, an element that comes up in many Bowland paintings, is all about the idea of projection—how the world views a person, and how that person wants to be viewed by the world. Makeup, especially heavy makeup, also plays into a bride’s wedding day and she registers beauty on her own face. “Makeup is such a big deal. It’s an important way of being loved, of being turned into an icon. Here, for this, I’ve basically turned her into Queen Elizabeth III. She has the gown on, she’s drowning slightly, she’s fingering these jewels on her ear, and she’s in this niche created by the bathtub, like a place a reverence,” Bowland says of the work. “From the daughter there is the mother, which is her future.”
The mother in the painting is nude, but Bowland sees it from a different perspective, one that sidesteps this idea of the “male gaze” and who can and can’t paint females figures. “Who gets to paint who and what is just hooey to me. I don’t even think I paint nudes. I paint naked people. Nudity is a concept, a concept of beauty. Sometimes I just paint people who are naked, which is different,” she says. “In either case, what do we look at when we see them? Do we look and see beauty? When I paint figures, naked or not, I want to look carefully at a person and feel like they are in the same space with me. I want to sympathize with them as people. They are not concepts, which is why I like painting makeup on people. The makeup is a way of turning people into concepts so we don’t have to address them individually. So sometimes I’ll throw the kitchen sink in with them, so they’re so indomitable that you can’t help but see the person there.”
Bowland’s newest pieces—including these two diptychs, which are being offered together or separate—will be on view in A New Day, opening August 24 at RJD Gallery in Bridgehampton, New York.
RJD Gallery 2385 Main Street • Bridgehampton, NY 11932 • (631) 725-1161 • www.rjdgallery.com
“I’ve been in love with Margaret’s paintings since
I first saw them in 2009, at a New York Academy event. They both seduce and possess you within minutes. Their raw emotional beauty go deeply to your heart, and the struggles and meaning of all life that we all face and encounter.”
– Richard J. Demato, principal, RJD Gallery