‘Chill out, Slow down.’ (After Titian)

Kate Howe, 2021, oil paint and oil pastel on canvas, 200 x 200 cm. Collection: Erotics of Power, Painting.

“I think very much about agency and ownership, about gendered power balances. I think about fear and about being easily led. I was thinking about influence, about flexing, about dominance, about cloning, about power and control. I was thinking about money, I was thinking about authenticity, I was thinking about fairness.

I am a student of Titian, the blue he uses in Bacchus and Adrianne is so surprising, so flat, so deep and so flat that we float in it while the tension circles below. The red velvet cape flows audaciously in the breeze as he saves her. He saves her, he saves her, there is always a damsel in distress. I paint the tension of the relationship, I lose my own impotence in the emphatic implied uneasiness: attraction, yes, but dominance. The fleshiness is there, are these sexual organs? The alien shows its cat whiskered face and the organism grows, changes, reaches, subsumes, consumes.

In getting free of gender or any other sociological distinction in my work, I can finally talk about the underlying power structures upon which these imbalanced relationships hang: the deeper problems of agency and entitlement, and the "Emoto-social" structures these create.”

- Excerpts from Howe’s writing on this piece.