Ana Benaroya

Region: Northeast

Website: http://www.anabenaroya.com

City / State: New Haven, CT

My work begins with the idea of feeling generally powerless in the world as a woman. When I was young, I really identified with the bodies of superheroes and athletes. I’d collect basketball cards, Marvel and DC Comics, and I’d faithfully try and draw and copy them. It was through this that I developed an interest in the masculine muscular body. It was the body I almost exclusively drew and depicted. And it’s through this body that I reimagined how I could start to depict women in my work. I imagine these women as physically, emotionally, spiritually, and sexually powerful. Their body and their emotional tenor is at its most extreme moment of operatic drama.

And it is through these depictions of women that I find myself extending my own understanding of my body and my power as a woman. Each time I paint a new figure I feel that I am able to extend myself through them.