Culture

A young woman poses in profile against an indistinct backdrop, a cigarette propped just so in her mouth as she gazes coolly into the unknown distance.

Another girl’s hair is drawn tightly back as she clenches her face into an expression of what could be pain or pleasure. The cigarette makes another appearance in the hand of a third young woman, who is biting her lip provocatively as she avoids the gaze of the viewer. A fourth portrait establishes a subject who is most unusually staring straight out of the artwork, her eyes beautifully rendered but seemingly elusive, her expression inconclusive.

These are some of the portraits that make up Jon Thom’s recent collections, which he has been exhibiting both privately and publicly in the last four years. A self-taught artist hailing from Christchurch, Thom’s study at the University of Otago has spanned an impressive variety of visual and verbal arts, including film, music, graphic design, and art history. He also co-founded Motion Sickness Studio, a company that provides art direction for clients in the art and music industry, as well as creating designs for the clothing label Moodie Tuesday.

He has clearly found his stylistic niche in the art world, as evident through his smoky portraits of insouciant young women that are highly suggestive of a kind of modern noir. His technique is self-assured, with the use of charcoal and pencil on paper creating controlled and evocative images of an alluring and elusive youth. The more I studied these portraits, however, the more I found myself subconsciously dividing them into two categories.

The first comprised those images of pouty-lipped young women, coyly seductive in a seemingly accidental way, with glimpses of their breasts peeking through oversized shirts and long tank tops. While certainly these girls were a) hot, b) skillfully rendered and c) appealing to the student demographic Thom creates for, I found them to be somewhat lifeless. Art-wise, a (probably male) viewer is far more likely to dwell on their scantily-clad forms than on the technical expression of the body, or the mood or disposition of the subject.

The second category of Thom’s artworks, however, provoked me far more as an art enthusiast, prompting me to become wholly immersed in these young women. These were the portraits that captured some indefinably compelling quality in the eyes of the subject, or in the defiant angle of the chin, or through the curlicues of hair that suggested life, energy, zest! Do I sound like a crazy person? Probably, but I hope you understand what I mean when you study Thom’s body of work. This latter “category” (these speech marks are meant to convey my uncertainty over using such a definitive division, as this is after all my personal opinion) contains images of women that portray a visceral state of mind or emotion more than a beautiful physical form. The young girl whose gaze directly assails the viewer is the most stunning of Thom’s portraits, as her ambiguous expression seems to belie the quiet intensity of her stare, creating a heightened mood of intrigue. Fingers crossed there’s a Moodie Tuesday t-shirt with my name on it (and her face on it) that I can snap up ASAP.