Lisa Yuskavage Becomes the Protagonist

After 35 years of painting her signature girls, the artist has decided to turn to a new subject: herself.

- Adam Moss

WHEN THE ARTIST Yuskavage was 27 and trying to figure out why her work was making her so miserable, she realized the women in her paintings were all facing the wrong way.

“Those paintings were mostly about backs,” she said to me. “And I thought, Why are they turned away? What are you hiding? Maybe you’re hiding their big tits. I decided to do the opposite of everything I’d ever done.”

She would get to those tits, but she began with the eyes: “The first thing I did was paint her eyes so that she was looking at you, locking eyes with you.”

After Yuskavage turned her figures around to face the viewer, the “recipe” (her word) started to emerge. It integrated her love of light with themes she had been circling all her life without quite registering it. Central was the theme of sexual vulnerability. She had a childhood friend who had been molested. This friend became the archetype of the girls who appear ubiquitously in Yuskavage’s work—the heliumtitted, animelike figures that are, she says, “my children.” Yuskavage’s children have grown-up bodies and little-girl faces. In a sense, they are all set in a pubescent world. “In puberty, you’re becoming sexual but you’re not ready to get fucked,” she says. “My paintings were like pubescent girls. They wanted to hide, but they couldn’t hide.”

From this idea came a torrent of work— a series called “Bad Babies”; then another, called “Bad Habits,” paintings made from Sculpey sculptures she had made; then paintings drawn from images in