Blue Doris

Notes

Blue Doris (1988) is a psychical portrait of the artist Doris Bloom. Bloom had impressed me with the single-minded management of her career as an international artist. I saw in her make-up a focused strength that I identified as "masculine". This descriptive term I use to describe personal qualities such as "single-minded", "aggressive", "unsentimental". These personal attributes were not encouraged in girls who grew up in the fifties and sixties. Yet for me they are desirable characteristics and when I perceived them in a younger woman they evoked my admiration and envy. The working procedure for the portrait of Doris relied on unconscious processes. Stimulated by my admiration for Bloom, the sculpture evolved into a bear-like creature, female, yet equipped with a penis. The sculpture was also constructed in two pieces that slot one into the other. The male aspect, shaped like an enlarged penis, is not seen when the form is assembled. But Doris is twice blessed with that symbol of power, the phallus. In Freudian terms, this may be read as an expression of penis envy. But, I believe that women do not desire the physical organ but the power that is represented by the phallus. It is thus the signified not the sign that women desire and envy. Unconsciously I had equipped Doris, twice, with the token of authority.¹

^1.Wilma Cruise (1997) Art as subject: subject as object. Masters Thesis, University of South Africa, page 17.