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.
Continued from Vol. 337
Before finding out what that image was, Vanessa assumed the association had something to do with her being a painter, because that’s how she regarded herself and that was primarily how fellow students would have seen her. More often than not, she travelled the corridors of the art school in paint-splattered jeans and over-sized button-down shirts she used as painting smocks, her long red hair held back in a pony tail. When she finally remembered to Google the album cover, she was stunned to see Alberto Vargas’ air-brushed illustration of a tall redhead in a sheer bodysuit and high heels lying provocatively across the hood of a pencil-drawn car, back of her hand to her forehead in some sort of gesture of vulnerability. Vanessa was fuming mad. The energy and the history of injustice struck her all at once. It wasn’t that she suddenly became a feminist; it’s that she realized she’d been one all along.
Vanessa took the name of Alberta Vargas and became engrossed in the perfect storm of that era. The 1940s air-brushed pin-up girls, the advent of advertising that launched an array of new consumer goods into a post-World War II marketplace that used the glossy objectification of the female form—all of which could be neatly summarized in a philosophical truth that had shaped every generation since. Sex sells.
One of those rare visionaries whose invented persona never looked back, Alberta Vargas was a super hero re-writing misguided steps in history. Her raison d’être was crystal clear in a way that made her quite remarkable as she applied a sort of Jackson Pollack bravado meshed with the political perspectives of Emma Goldman, the 20th century’s most notable anarcha-feminist. The artistic upshot—the evidence of everything that Alberta had processed—was an extremely mature series of paintings about women as opposed to paintings of women.
“On The Row Of Dials” from Flood Plain (K, 1993) (download):
