In a conversation Lisa Yuskavage had with Chuck Close in 1996, she came up with a characteristically colourful way of describing her tendency to put her talent to such poor use: "like a nun with a foul mouth." Raised in a working-class, Catholic home in Philadelphia, she briefly entertained the possibility of becoming a nun, but ultimately decided to go to art school. Whether she retained the other half of the description she offered to Chuck Close, only her intimates can know with certainty, but there are critics of the art she has produced since the mid-'90s who wouldn't be surprised to hear the figures in them utter language as colourful as the canvases they inhabit.
Viewing Lisa Yuskavage's painted world is a confusing experience. We are presented with all manner of possible gazings, from the teasing liquidities of girl on girl, to the delicate performance of looking and touching that constitutes the act of masturbation. Hers is a woman's world (more accurately, a girl's world), where chronology hasn't caught up to groinology. And while the upper bodies of her females don't match the extravagant proportions of the women in the art of her friend, John Currin, there is still a noticeable degree of exaggeration in her paintings. She is capable of pushing certain portions of the body beyond conventional depiction. "I have an interest in full-throttle, full-on engagement," she says. "I like the idea of overwhelming."
Early in her painting career, she let her tributary side show; there are works that have the sensual insouciance of Bonnard, like Sleeper (Fragile), 1984; or the cheeky concupiscence of Balthus, like Girl with Skewer, 1996, and Cookie, 1998. In these works, Yuskavage was trying out both styles and subjects: she has been concerned in equal measure with how she paints and what she paints, although she would have us believe that "all my paintings seem to be about painting." They are also about looking and desiring; it's just that we're never really sure how much tongue we should have in our cheek when we focus our attention on the operation of desire in the work. It would take an unusual degree of objectivity to appreciate only the aesthetic qualities of paintings like Shirtwaist and Nipple, both from 1999 and both lifted from the uncomplicated domain of soft-core porn. Nor would she be satisfied with that narrow a reading. She doesn't think anyone should ever be praised for their technique; being a painter without technique "would be like saying you're a pilot but you don't know how to fly a plane."
Yuskavage has remarked that one of her intentions was to combine Rembrandt with colour-field painting, to which she might have added, and the sensibility of early Penthouse magazine. Among her most notorious paintings is Screwing Her Pussy on Straight, 1997, in which a very busty blonde, naked except for a shrug, pays reverent attention to her very bushy nether region. The interior is a reprising of Bonnard; the subject mimics Bob Guccione; and the mark making pays tribute to Rembrandt. The final picture is classic Yuskavage.