The rape of nature takes a romantic twist in Meg Langhorne’s “Animal.” Recherché gouaches on paper paintings depict burly, macho men embracing swooning creatures: voluptuous women’s bodies with deer heads. Inspired by the covers of romance novels and similar in subject matter, scale and composition, these paperback book-size works are humorous but also unnerving.
Langhorne, who works in a used bookstore, has developed an appreciation for the seductive cover images for the seemingly endless waves of romance novels washing across the shore of the American imagination. She debuted her latest drawings in a recent show at the Cactus Bra Space.
While critically disdained, romance novels are among the most popular products of pop culture. Romance is a $1.3 billion a year business, satisfying 51 million mostly female readers. However, the majority of the cover illustration artists are male. The covers are as codified and formulaic as the novels themselves, filled with masculine iconography such as swords, bulging biceps and bare chests.
Langhorne draws parallels between romantic conquest and hunting, as both require the use of predatory skills. And, like it or not, many of these romance covers are designed to appeal to female rape fantasies, which are much less violent than the male variety. If romance novels are any indication, vast numbers of women dream of being seduced against their will and swept away from their humdrum lives by brawny rogue himbos – bad boys.
In “Swell,” a Fabioesque model with long blonde hair, wearing purple tights and robe, leans over a doe/woman in a green dress against a purple background. In her paintings, Langhorne exaggerates the contrast of colors to be somewhat more garish than the sedate and predictable palette of the book covers. Red desert rocks seem to be burning like Atlanta in “Burn,” a scene reminiscent of Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler’s iconic embrace in the poster for “Gone With the Wind.” In “Flower,” giant blossoms drift through an idyllic meadow scene of luminous greens with a man licking the neck of a deer-headed woman wearing a bright yellow dress, who gazes at the viewer with uncomfortable intimacy.
Working with extremely fine brushes, Langhorne provides rich layers of detail, though she prefers to replace the man-made objects such as castles and plantation mansions in the backgrounds of the book cover illustrations with her own tranquil images of nature – neat hedgerows, lovely trees and picturesque rocks. She also uses a more painterly technique that appears rougher and more textured than the glossy forms of the romance covers, which can be advertising slick. Langhorne doesn’t really consider herself a painter – she hated it as an undergraduate – but for this project, she felt that, conceptually, the images needed to be painted because the cover illustrations are based on paintings.
Oddly, unlike their romance novel counterparts, Langhorne’s doe-eyed women usually appear distracted and not all that interested in the attentions of their muscle-bound suitors. They nibble on leaves or gaze longingly in the distance, perhaps dreaming of big-horned bucks. While religion and folklore have given us romantic notions about the sentience of nature and our God-given right to be its master, in reality nature is indifferent and knows nothing of mankind’s desires and needs.
If most of Langhorne’s works allude to the anthropormorphosis of nature, then “Buck” powerfully suggests the reverse. A man with the horned head of a male deer stands nobly with one hand on a sword. His leg is grasped by a comely, young woman, who is more like a pinup from a men’s magazine than the typical romance heroine. Nature may often seem the vulnerable victim of man’s desires, but there are times when nature becomes the ruler, and we its often unwilling supplicants. Langhorne seems to be asking if we love nature or merely lust for its treasures. And as the title of her exhibit ambiguously suggests, just who is the animal?
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