Back when the artist Lisa Yuskavage was trying to figure out why her work was making her so miserable, she realized that the women in her paintings were all facing the wrong way.
“Those paintings were mostly about backs,” she said to me. “And I thought, Why are they turned away? What are you hiding? Maybe you’re hiding their big tits. I decided to do the opposite of everything I’d ever done.”
She would get to those tits, but she began with the eyes. “The first thing I did, I painted her eyes, so that she was looking at you, locking eyes with you,” Yuskavage says. “You’re fucked up and I’m watching you. With every new painting at the time, I started with the eyes.”