Jenny's Venus

Boticelli’s Venus, the ancient Venus de Milo, and most other artistic depictions of the goddess of love are representations that emphasize the female beauty in the flesh, in accordance to the male gaze. For Jenny Do, the goddess of love deserves more than such one-dimensional treatment.

Jenny looks for a beauty that is omnipresent and enduring. Putting together elements borrowed from nature, Jenny was able to attain a composition that suggests the shape of a woman, and in this particular case, that of the Venus de Milo. Venus is as mysterious as the sea and as intimate as the earth, and she is at the same time powerful and nurturing. She is faceless, as her beauty transcends the describable.

Jenny often resorts to the “dynamic of the opposites” to compose her works. She explores static contrasts of basic elements as well as active conflicts of movements. She shares Piet Mondrian’s belief that relations of opposites as “primordial relations” in nature. But while Mondrian used geometric vertical and horizontal lines to demarcate the opposing elements, Jenny depicts her opposite elements in their natural forms, and looks for ways to contrast or combine them into a new form. Thus male/female, black/white, vertical/horizontal, large/small, and all other relations of opposites are meaningless unless and until such relations produce another form of existence.

In Venus’s case, Jenny merely combines two different natural elements, the sea and the earth, to produce her desired result. The mystery of the sea contrasts with the intimacy of the earth; the same can be said about water and soil. Jenny’s Venus is not the conventional portrayal of a voluptuous woman. Rather, she is the one who can understand and explain the primordial relation of the opposites, as she herself was born from such relation. DD

Venus by Jenny Do. Oil on Canvas

Courtesy of GreenRice Gallery