Eye on the scene
Moe Delaitre
She has created striking portraits, stunning street art, and, in this process of mixing mediums— emphasises the indelible female experience.
“I'm obsessed with the theme of birdcages; I don't know if you've noticed” said Moe Delaitre, walking through her eccentric studio. She is a perfect blend of mystery, palpable warmth, and wit—just like her home, adorned with arresting portraits on almost every wall in the living room and stacked along the studio’s perimeter. There's a clock that reads ‘Fuck Trump’, chickens named Aretha, Bonnie, and Clyde flitting about in the garden, and a happy grey cat.
“I started young and fell in love with the smell. My grandfather had a lot of art books, and I thought, 'That's what I want to do.' I was very much a realist classical portraitist for a long time.” For ten years, she studied in Baltimore under David Zuccarini. Delaitre has had her work featured in numerous private collections and several public institutions, including the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, The United States Naval Academy, and the University of Maryland’s Dental Museum.
“I started young and fell in love with the smell. My grandfather had a lot of art books, and I thought, 'That's what I want to do.' I was very much a realist classical portraitist for a long time.” For ten years, she studied in Baltimore under David Zuccarini. Delaitre has had her work featured in numerous private collections and several public institutions, including the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, The United States Naval Academy, and the University of Maryland’s Dental Museum.
Great portraiture convey a likeness of the subject, while memorialising the artist’s perceived version of the sitter. In this process, Delaitre seeks to capture the soul of the subject— “it's not that they're sombre, just that you try to find something of their soul”. Her portrait series Seven Virtues, is inspired by the lyrics of Eva Cassidy, the soul-stirring singer from Delaitre’s very own Annapolis, Maryland.
“Music gives you these jewels inside of you. Hearing the far-off bird or the owl or the chickens. It gives you kind of a sparkle inside. I don't know how to play music. I don't know how to sing. I don't know how to write words but I can paint. So I try to move, move that feeling into, into what I'm painting”.
Delaitre’s old master style of elegance and poise was met with a shift when she moved to France in 2002. She realised how the French art scene reckons portraits as bygone. “About ten years ago, going back and forth to Paris so much and seeing the street art really got me”. After extensive research into street art and graffiti, she conceptualised a mix of “romantic, realistic style with kind of the dirty style of street art.”
Her series on Coco Chanel was the first time she hand-cut stencils to put on the walls in the streets and spray paint over them. Boxing Mamas is her homage to the women who held everything up. The graffiti is compelling and powerful. “I started having this image in my head of a mother who is just doing everything she can to keep her family and life together,” said the artist walking the streets of La Ferté-sous-Jouarre that catalogue her work.
Her series on Coco Chanel was the first time she hand-cut stencils to put on the walls in the streets and spray paint over them. Boxing Mamas is her homage to the women who held everything up. The graffiti is compelling and powerful. “I started having this image in my head of a mother who is just doing everything she can to keep her family and life together,” said the artist walking the streets of La Ferté-sous-Jouarre that catalogue her work.
“I'm not interested in fighting against the male gaze, but I am interested in my gaze.”
“I'm not interested in fighting against the male gaze,” Delaitre said, with a smile, perhaps a bit coyly— “but I am interested in my gaze”. Males were, in most cases, the presumed spectators for art. John Berger (1972) developed this thesis in his book, Ways of Seeing— In noting the many nude paintings of women in Western art where the woman is presented as passive and available, he argued that the man is the surveyor, the woman surveyed (Garber, E. 1992).
Delaitre’s female portraits are an antithesis to the male gaze. Her work in progress is a hundred and fifty portraits of women. “My women, the women who live here with me, or the women who live where I live in the States, in Annapolis, Maryland, or upstate New York; the old, the young and there's some pregnant women and black women, and white women and brown women''. Her vision is these portraits of ‘ordinary’ women sitting in the same position, and wearing the same tutu skirt, hung all around the gallery, going in and out of all the walls whilst continuing her discussion about the lives of women.
Garber, E. (1992). Feminism, Aesthetics, and Art Education. Studies in Art Education, 33(4), 210–225. https://doi.org/10.2307/1320667
