The strength of pigment – whether experienced in an oil painting, or on one’s face – becomes commensurately forceful when, as in the case of Beverly McIver’s paintings, the instrument is the statement, underscoring how these works straddle the worlds of self-portraiture, action painting, and ritual masquerade. But it is especially in the last category – a cosmetic-fashioned protocol imposing an alternative personality or a larger-than-expected social role on the art subject – that McIver’s paintings complicate the conventional perceptions of the art medium.
“Pigments and Personas,” in Beverly McIver: Full Circle, ed., Kim Boganey, Berkeley: University of California, 2022, 24-33.
