Susan Singer

Susan Singer paints female nudes of all sizes, shapes, ages, and races with the intention of showing the world just how gorgeous each of us is!



Extended bio follows:

Ever since Singer started getting messages from her father about the unacceptability of her natural form when she was 7 or 8, Singer has known there’s injustice and prejudice in the world towards women’s bodies. Two years ago she began to do something about it.

After a lifetime of mounting frustration at seeing the “ideal” woman become taller and thinner, she felt called to do something about the idiocy of this unattainable ideal and began photographing and painting models of her own. These were not the models from Vogue or Cosmopolitan. Instead, Singer’s models are women you see in the grocery store or in the park with their kids or perhaps in your own mirror at home.

Ever since she began to draw as a forty-year-old mother of three, she has focused on issues of the body which arose from the challenges of her own life. Feeling unseen by her ex-husband when she was pregnant with their children, Singer chose to first draw pregnant nudes in order to assure herself of their utter grandeur and splendor. Learning that others could also see their magnificence, she realized that she, too, had been beautiful and fecund and worthy. Her art helped her heal from the wound of not having been seen as perfectly beautiful.

Shortly thereafter, reeling from her ten-year-old son’s emergency spinal surgery, she drew his scarred back, four feet tall and two feet wide. She needed to touch it and feel it and try to understand this change in her child’s future. Suddenly everyone she knew had a scar story to tell and a new series was born.

In the name of all women, having felt objectified by society and the media, Singer decided to turn things on their head and objectify men in her series Twelve Naked Men. Drawing only their torsos and using strong unnatural color but otherwise extreme realism, Singer surrounded the viewer with twelve male torsos in all their glory – nude, unseeing, passively submitting to the viewer’s unabashed curiosity and inspection.

After years of skirting around her primary concern – the harsh judgments women have towards their own bodies - Singer finally decided to tackle it head on. She began painting life-sized women. She showed them, too, without faces at first. Most of her models didn’t want to be identifiable for fear of retaliation at work or by family. Her original intention was to paint them much as she had the twelve naked men, though this time showing their full torsos, 24 of them, standing sentinel in the viewing hall, Amazonian in scale and imposing. However she soon was overcome by the inherent, undeniable grace and beauty of each and every model. As the women paraded through her studio, their natural beauty asserted itself and made itself known to the point where the torso shots were completely unsatisfying. A hand on the hip, a foot placed just so, and everything shifted. Singer began to see what has captivated artists for millennia – the inherent grace and beauty of the female form.

But not just of slender, lithe socially-acceptable bodies. One of Singer’s early models was a 270-pound woman who waddled into her studio somewhat painfully but immediately let her presence be known. Here was a woman who had come to terms with her bulk and loved and celebrated every inch of it. Having grown up around her mother’s shame and embarrassment about each added ounce, Singer was transformed by this woman’s solid confidence and self-love. She redoubled her efforts to express this love and admiration for the authentic female form on canvas.

The resulting series, Not Barbie: A Celebration of Real Women has been touted as a transformational experience for viewers of both genders. Singer’s assertion is that once we have the opportunity to actually see women of all shapes and sizes, our eyes can become attuned and accustomed to all forms of body beauty. We will recognize the untruths advertisers throw at us to increase our feelings of inadequacy so we’ll buy their products to forestall our dread of becoming one of “them” – “them” being women very much like Singer’s models – normal, real women with bulges and creases and flab and scars and authenticity.

To see Singer’s exhibit of female nudes is to give ones eyes the opportunity to adjust to authentic beauty much like a walk in the woods on a splendid spring day after a trip to Disney World. Both have their merits, but the woods, like Singer’s nudes, we soon realize, offer something real and fundamentally true, solid, and knowable, complete without plastic, glitz or shine. We realize we’ve come home to the place we want to be.

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