STAR: What Do You See When You Look at Someone?
On body image, beauty standards, social comparison, human behaviour and the different currencies by which we measure a life.
There is a woman lying in the middle of a swimming pool. She has made herself very comfortable. Her arms are open, her legs are open, and she occupies considerably more than the minimum amount of water required for one human being. She is not adjusting her stomach, searching for a flattering angle or wondering what the people around the pool might be thinking. She didn’t prepare for summer. She arrived, and now you are looking at her.
That is where STAR, a painting from my EXISTENTIAL OBSERVATIONS series, begins: with the reaction that appears in the observer.
WHAT DID YOU THINK FIRST?
Perhaps you found her funny, beautiful, excessive, free, unhealthy, magnificent, undisciplined, confident, sexy, ridiculous or enviable. You may have immediately decided that she loves herself, or reached precisely the opposite conclusion.
What interests me is the speed with which this happens. We can look at another human being for a few seconds and begin constructing an entire biography from the evidence available to us. A body becomes a personality, a posture becomes a value system, clothes become financial status, facial expression becomes a childhood and behaviour becomes character.
Yet we know almost nothing.
We do not know who this woman is, what relationship she has had with her body, what she values, what she has survived, what she has achieved or what appearance means within the hierarchy of her life. She may have spent years fighting with her body or never fought with it at all. The body we see may represent her ideal of beauty, or appearance may rank very low among the things she considers important. She could be an extraordinary doctor, a brilliant lawyer, the person running a company, somebody who has spent the last eleven months looking after everyone except herself and has finally reached a swimming pool where nobody requires anything from her, or somebody for whom this is an entirely ordinary Tuesday.
We don't know, but we react, and our reaction may reveal considerably more about our own system of values than it reveals about her.
WE MEASURE OTHER PEOPLE'S LIVES IN OUR OWN CURRENCY
This is something I find fascinating about human behaviour. We often assume that other people are trying to win the same game we are playing, when in reality the currencies by which people measure a successful life can be completely different.
For one person, physical appearance is a major life investment, with training, nutrition, skincare, beauty treatments, clothes and the continuing project of self-development occupying a significant part of their attention. Another person invests heavily in knowledge, another in money or professional status, while somebody else places greater value on family, freedom, pleasure or spiritual development. Because we know how much our own currency has cost us, we tend to value it highly.
A person who has spent years building financial capital may look at somebody who has accumulated qualifications instead and wonder why that person spent so much time studying. The highly educated person may look back and wonder how somebody could spend an entire life thinking about money. Someone who has developed an extraordinary physique may appear superficial to a person who does not value appearance, yet maintaining the discipline required to build that body may tell a much more complicated story. A person who appears completely unconcerned with other people's expectations may look careless from the outside, while achieving that degree of resistance to social judgement can itself require considerable inner work.
The accounting becomes more complicated as soon as we recognise that people are not necessarily accumulating the same currency.
THE BODY HAS BECOME A PUBLIC PROJECT
We live in an extraordinarily appearance-conscious visual culture. There is now an entire vocabulary of improvement: the summer body, the transformation, the glow-up, the beauty treatment, the procedure, the before and after. There is always another centimetre to lose, another area to improve, another angle to photograph and another version of yourself waiting somewhere ahead.
There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting to change yourself. Self-development can be pleasurable, creative and deeply meaningful. What interests me is what happens when improvement becomes a permanent background process, and at what point becoming yourself begins to turn into becoming someone else.
If thousands of people are independently trying to discover their “best selves”, why can those selves begin to look strangely similar? Similar faces, lips, brows, poses and photographs can make individuality increasingly difficult to read.
For me, individuality is like a code into another person's story. Something unusual makes me curious because it gives me an entrance into the questions of who this person is and how they became this particular version of a human being.
STAR IS NOT A BODY-POSITIVITY INSTRUCTION
I don't want STAR to tell you that you should want this woman's body, and I don't want it to tell you that you shouldn't. Neither of us knows enough about her to produce that verdict.
We cannot determine from looking at someone whether their body is the product of freedom, circumstance, genetics, culture, illness, pleasure, pain, priorities, exhaustion, rebellion, indifference or a complicated combination of experiences accumulated over an entire life.
That uncertainty matters because observation becomes much more interesting when we resist producing an immediate verdict. She may accept herself completely or neglect herself in ways we cannot see; both interpretations could contain some truth, and both could be entirely wrong. Human beings are rarely as cleanly organised as the categories we use to explain them.
SHE RESTS AS IF RESTING WERE A SERIOUS OCCUPATION
There is, however, something we can see. At this particular moment, she is committed to the experience.
She is not performing relaxation while continuing to supervise herself. Her body occupies the water and her attention appears to belong to the moment. There is something almost regal about people who can inhabit space like this, as though they require two seats: one for themselves and another for their sense of self.
I find that funny, and I also find it strangely impressive, because many of us have become extremely skilled at experiencing ourselves from the outside. We can be sitting somewhere while simultaneously monitoring whether the position is flattering, what everyone else sees, how the photograph would look and what the scene says about us.
STAR appears, at least for this moment, to have resigned from that job.
AND THEN THERE IS THE MAN
A man sits nearby with a drink and another woman, yet something about STAR has caught his attention. I deliberately do not want to decide for him what that attention means.
He could find her attractive, amusing or confronting; he could envy the freedom with which she occupies the space, recognise something familiar in her, or be intrigued by an experience that does not fit his expectations. Judging by his own relaxed relationship with physical perfection, recognition of a kindred spirit should probably not be dismissed.
Perhaps he is asking the same question we are: What exactly am I looking at?
I like the idea that she gives him an additional pleasure inside an experience he was already having. He has the holiday, the drink, the companion, and now an unexpected visual event has entered the scene. STAR becomes almost a dessert, a little Pavlova at the end of the experience.
Yet the attraction may have very little to do with her body. It may be the intensity with which she appears capable of surrendering to an experience. If she can surrender to rest this completely, what happens when she works, loves, argues, raises children or pursues whatever matters to her? Perhaps she approaches everything with the same intensity, or perhaps she is exhausted and this is the first time in years that she has allowed herself to stop.
We cannot know, and the uncertainty is the point.
I HAVE ALWAYS WATCHED PEOPLE THIS WAY
This is one of the reasons I created EXISTENTIAL OBSERVATIONS. When I look at somebody, I rarely see only clothes, a face or a body; I begin reading a system and wondering about the family in which that person grew up, the roles they learned, the social environment that formed them, the expectations they accepted and those they resisted.
I wonder how much of the adult still belongs to the “good girl” or “good boy” trying to earn approval, and how much belongs to the rebel who built an identity around doing the opposite. Rebellion itself fascinates me because escaping something does not necessarily mean we have stopped relating to it.
A person can leave a relationship and transform their entire body “to show them”, experiencing the transformation as liberation while the person they escaped remains present inside the motivation. The behaviour has changed, but the relationship to the original reference point may still be organising the new behaviour.
This is why I find human beings endlessly interesting. We are experiences built from other experiences. Families, lovers, friendships, humiliation, admiration, money, education, culture, genetics, opportunities, disappointments and thousands of apparently insignificant daily choices leave traces, and some of those traces are what I want to paint.
WHY STAR?
The title came naturally because she is physically arranged almost like a star and is unquestionably the centre of this small universe, yet nobody appointed her to the position. There was no algorithm, audience vote, beauty standard or carefully constructed personal brand selecting her.
She became the star because something about her presence made everybody else part of her composition.
The man looks at her, I turn the observation into a painting, and now you are looking at that painting and bringing your own experience into it. Her experience has entered ours, and perhaps that is another way to think about being a star.
WE ALTER ONE ANOTHER'S EXPERIENCE BY BEING HERE
I could have painted something else, and you could have spent these minutes doing something entirely different. Instead, for this period of time, you have been looking at STAR and thinking about her. Something has passed between experiences.
This interests me beyond painting because every person is having an experience of being alive that nobody else can reproduce exactly. We arrive with different bodies, histories, temperaments and circumstances, then make choices within them, and the consequences of those choices enter other people's lives.
Sometimes seeing somebody live differently introduces a possibility we had never considered. STAR might make one person want to book a holiday and surrender to a swimming pool, while another may reconsider a judgement they once made about somebody else. She may change nothing except the direction of a thought for thirty seconds.
All of those reactions interest me because STAR does not ask you to agree with her. She asks you to notice what happens inside you when you see her.
Before moving on, stay with that reaction for a moment. Consider what you saw, what you assumed, what you judged and what you admired, then ask yourself how much of that belonged to the woman in the painting and how much belonged to you.
STAR EXISTENTIAL OBSERVATIONS Original acrylic painting by Margarita Ceko Gold Coast, Australia