In Norman Rockwell’s 1960 “Triple Self-Portrait,” the illustrator studies himself in a mirror, using his reflection as a guide to paint his portrait on a large canvas. In Rockwell’s characteristically whimsical, caricature-adjacent style, he acknowledges the history of artists painting themselves with the self-portraits of Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Picasso and others tacked onto his easel.
Inspired by “Triple Self-Portrait,” Grant Park artist Hail Holtzclaw’s painting “Playdumb” (2022) riffs on Rockwell’s Americana-infused work.
In “Playdumb,” on view through Jan. 10 at southwest Atlanta’s The End Project Space, Holtzclaw “plays” an artist gazing into a mirror, holding a brush aloft as she prepares to paint her own likeness.
Credit: Photo courtesy of The End Project Space/Alphonso Whitfield
Credit: Photo courtesy of The End Project Space/Alphonso Whitfield
Her self-portrait is a tongue-in-cheek spin on a Playboy magazine cover. Like Rockwell’s work, it comments upon an artist’s self-invention, while also engaging in a larger cultural critique of how women are represented in traditional men’s magazines.
“Playdumb” isn’t just a painting of a pretty blond wearing an artist’s apron and little else. It’s also a snarky takedown of the vision of women — as beautifully vacuous and inert — that a magazine like Playboy presents to the world. In Holtzclaw’s clever turnabout, women aren’t the joke, they’re in on it, lampooning the insipid stereotypes.
Holtzclaw’s solo show “Gloss” offers up six conceptual self-portraits that use magazines as their jumping-off point in humorous riffs on popular “glossies,” including National Geographic, Vogue, Heavy Metal and Guns & Ammo.
For Holtzclaw, magazines provide a rich artistic playground. “I feel like it’s a very flexible lens, and I really enjoy working through frameworks,” she said. “I’m really interested in remixing and taking either historical or more contemporary compositions and recontextualizing them to create a new story.”
A fan of old media and a collector of vintage National Geographics, Holtzclaw sees a real affinity between her work and the way Rockwell also depicted the good and bad of American culture, highlighting a country defined by abundance and material wealth but also sometimes lacking in empathy and justice.
Credit: Photo courtesy of The End Project Space
Credit: Photo courtesy of The End Project Space
In Holtzclaw’s satirical takedowns, these magazines’ covers have been juiced with the artist’s hyperrealist painting style and witty use of her own face and body to critique the many, often narrow, ways women are portrayed in popular culture.
That contemporary social commentary is layered with Holtzclaw’s savvy references to the art history she studied while pursuing her Bachelor of Fine Arts at Georgia State University.
For instance, her spoof of a Heavy Metal magazine cover is inspired by Baroque painter Georges de La Tour’s 17th century “The Cheat with the Ace of Diamonds.” Holtzclaw mashes up allegorical tropes from de La Tour’s painting with a more knowing, self-aware contemporary perspective. Holtzclaw has layered de La Tour’s treatise on vices like lust and gambling with a contemporary lexicon of fake breasts and kitschy animal figurines that comically blur the lines between good and bad taste.
The process to achieve these collisions of past and present is elaborate. Holtzclaw first photographs her scenes — dressing up in costumes, wigs and prosthetics. She then uses Photoshop to layer on additional images and details to get the look she’s after long before she picks up a brush and begins to paint.
“It’s more tactical and performative than most typical painters,” noted The End gallerist and artist Craig Drennen.
In the comparably kitschy “Guns & Glammo” (2023), Holtzclaw sports a star-spangled bikini and holds two revolvers over her head like a Yosemite Sam pinup in her intentionally ludicrous amalgam of sex and guns.
Credit: Photo courtesy The End Project Space/Alphonso Whitfield
Credit: Photo courtesy The End Project Space/Alphonso Whitfield
In another magazine parody, “Vague,” Holtzclaw is decked out in an elaborately detailed Elizabethan gown and ghostly powdered face, her teeth the color of granite — a nod to the aristocrats who tend to show up in the pages of the blue chip fashion magazine Vogue. The composition is a riff on Flemish painter Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger’s circa 1600 “Rainbow Portrait” of Queen Elizabeth I who holds a rainbow in her hand. Though here, the rainbow suggests the artist’s tool kit of color and light held tightly in Holtzclaw’s talented grip.
“I think I’ve always used humor to cope and also humor to communicate,” Holtzclaw said of the subversive mix of critique and satire that makes her work so distinctive.
Not everyone is in on the joke. Sometimes, Holtzclaw said, she gets Instagram comments on paintings like “Playdumb,” telling her she’d be great as a model on OnlyFans, the online platform where creators trade sexual imagery for money.
Instead of getting her dander up at such superficial observations about her work, Holtzclaw seems unbothered.
“I want to lead people to complexity, and I like inconclusiveness, and I like open dialogue that sort of never ends,” she said.
At one point in her life, Holtzclaw said, being sexy and playing into her blond prettiness was how she presented herself to the world. But in her paintings, sexiness is more of a spoof. Lately she’s been dressing more for comfort, and for long hours in her University of Georgia studio where she’s working toward a Master of Fine Arts degree in studio art.
Like most American women, Holtzclaw is a shape-shifter who has tested out personas growing up under the sway of social media.
Credit: Photo by Dan Almasy
Credit: Photo by Dan Almasy
Born Hailey (“my government name,” she jokes), in 1996 in Augusta, Hail (as her family nicknamed her) grew up from age 6 with a sister and a single mother in Alpharetta.
“We were home alone a lot, and we had to entertain ourselves. And I feel like, you know, dressing up and pretending and playing like that was just something I had a lot of unrestricted, unsupervised time to do.”
“I have memories of just, like, being in my room and just, like, drawing for hours and hours and hours.”
Her mother, Kim, likes to tell the story of how, when Hail was in elementary school, her principal and teacher arranged a meeting with Kim to talk about her daughter. The stressed-out single mother braced for a disciplinary meeting. But instead, the teacher called Kim in to tell her that her daughter was drawing anatomically correct hands at an age when her classmates were still creating stick figures. The school said Hail’s skills were “not normal for a child her age,” and Kim was urged to get art lessons for her daughter, though they were not in the family’s budget.
In college, Holtzclaw entertained the idea of a practical career in something like nursing. She also pursued a career in music for a time but always came back to making art. Though art is clearly her focus, she works, along with her sister and mother, at the front desk of a dental practice on breaks from school.
Holtzclaw only recently shifted from drawing to painting after taking a directed study course with Drennen in 2021. Drennen said he’s been impressed by how quickly Holtzclaw has married oil painting’s formal challenges with her own conceptual interests in pop culture, gender roles and art history.
Holtzclaw said Nigerian photographer Iké Udé — who has also used the magazine cover format to critique representations of race and gender — is a big influence. Drennen noted that Holtzclaw’s work also brings to mind photographer Cindy Sherman, who is known for incorporating self-portraits in her images.
“Hail’s approach feels smart and strategic in the tradition of Cindy Sherman,” Drennen said. “And like Sherman, Hail has no fear of the absurd. That’s what made Hail Holtzclaw’s work stand out — it was idea-driven and well-painted with a nice dose of critical satire.”
IF YOU GO
“Gloss”
Through Jan. 10. Noon-4 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays and by appointment. Free. The End Project Space, 1870 Murphy Ave. SW, Atlanta. On Instagram: @the_end_project_space. Email: acdrennen@gmail.com.
