Instagram photo by Cthulu • Dec 16, 2016 at 1:28pm UTC

Today on Mistigram, another painting (“Smoke and Mirrors”) by the hugely talented Delphine Hennelly from MIST1116 – another piece in her series exploring the phenomenon of women and selfies. Woman posing for a painting drawn by a man = fine art, woman posing for a self-portrait = vain and shallow, right? That’s the standard breakdown. These paintings challenge that narrative. Sisters are doing it for, by and of themselves.

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Dec 16, 2016 at 1:28pm UTC

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Nov 3, 2016 at 8:47pm UTC

Compare & contrast: through the photographer’s lens, the photographer is a god! But externally, the photographer – focused on a dinky little machine, contorting their body to get just the right angle – is ridiculous and pitiable! And surely nowhere more so than the reviled selfie, stand-in for generational misogyny for years now!

Painter Delphine Hennelly is in the middle of a series of works exploring the theme of the selfie, but none of them carry a more unsettling subtext than this, the “Bathroom Selfie” featured in MIST1016, enshrining one girl’s attempt to (optimistically? foolishly?) squeeze beauty out of a context of larger-than-life squalor. (That’s funny, I’ve lost my appetite!)

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Nov 3, 2016 at 8:47pm UTC