Beautiful Death

Title/Artist: 'Beautiful Death' by Leesa Gray-Pitt

Medium: Oil Paint and Moulding Paste on Wood Panel
Year Created: 2022

Size (W)x(H): approx 15cm x 40cm

More Info: www.leesagraypitt.com

Artwork/Artist Description: Death is certain. All of this is temporary. This piece represents life’s transience and includes tears for those we have lost and flowers to also represent fragility. We always place flowers on a coffin or grave - do we try to make death beautiful in this way? Many cultures celebrate the moving on of the soul. Western culture doesn’t want to talk about it. Especially the death of a child.

My body of work employs layering to create paintings that explore the complexity of the feminine identity. Addressing body image and feminism, I portray my women not as victims of marketability, morality or politics but with a found strength and agency. I purposely source materials such as textiles and fashion magazines to explore how society measures gender, ideas of power and notions of beauty. Often adorning my paintings with flowers, butterflies, gold leaf, and gems, symbolic of the fraught relationship women have to beauty, innocence, protection and patriarchy. Importantly I use them as separate components that may stand on their own or to an idea of interconnectedness, overlapping identities and intersectionality.
In particular, focusing on intersectionality, of the need to consider both the individual and shared experiences of women in contemporary society.