Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 31-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.
An excerpt from Holding Up The Falling Snake Sky: a novel-in-progress.
Alberta Vargas, whose real name was Vanessa Jones, painted strong women replicating, some of the same costumes, props and poses that air-brush artist Alberto Vargas used in his famous 1940s pin-up girl paintings, but Alberta’s work wildly reclaimed the rights to a feminine integrity that shouldn’t have been derailed by the likes of Alberto Vargas—or any other painters that came before or after him, including one Pablo Picasso and his skewered treatment of women both on and off canvas.
Alberta was neither Latina nor a proponent of the air-brushing techniques that had made Alberto Vargas’ pin-up girls famous. Having grown up in the small town of Courtenay on Vancouver Island in the 1990s, Vanessa was only vaguely aware of third-wave feminism’s political touchstones of zine culture, riot grrrl and Bikini Kill. Feminism wasn’t a hot topic in a town that historically pitted loggers and miners against environmental activists.
After moving from Courtenay to Vancouver to attend the Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Vanessa discovered the work of Alberto Vargas quite by accident after having a male student tell her that she bore a striking resemblance to the woman on the cover of the Cars’ album Candy-O.
Continued in Vol. 338
“Walking The Walls” from Flood Plain (K, 1993) (download):
