by Cate House

Two graduate students in fine arts render their pasts.

t’s enough to be an adolescent girl without all of the other outside pressures society puts on you,” Carrie Alter says.

Alter is the oldest of four girls in her upper-middle class family. They all spent each Saturday for two years piling into the car and driving to John Powers School of Manners. She and her sisters learned how to put on makeup, walk in high heels, get into and out of cars, and act appropriate around gentlemen. “It made for a very long day,” she says.

Alter’s father, a successful businessman who frequented the race tracks, expected his daughters to be proper young ladies. “Heaven forbid if we had a pimple,” Alter says.

The large-scale paintings exhibited as part of Alter’s master’s thesis express the pressures of propriety on adolescent girls. One painting is inspired by a photograph of Alter and her sisters. They’re standing in front of their father, perhaps getting ready to take off to their Saturday etiquette class. Dressed in mauve and pearls, they’re made up to look twice their ages.

Alter began with an initial drawing of the photograph, then, as she says, filled in the lines. As she paints, her pictures grow moody. “They’re really bright when they start out,” she says, “but they just get so dark with the layers. That’s why I like painting—because of all of the layers of paint and the texture that it creates.”

he paintings of her sisters aren’t meant to be realistic, she says. “When I’m working from photos, they are usually happy, and that’s not what I’m trying to get across in the painting. So I try to imagine what they would look like in other ways—sad or thoughtful—and that changes the drawing. I also change them by taking eyes from one photograph, a mouth of another, a head from one, and a body from another.”

Sometimes Alter finds the expression she needs on the face of a model in an adult magazine such as Barely Legal. Like Alter’s subjects, these young women are enacting the fantasies of men. She says, “There’s this age in the girls’ eyes where they are young, but they look like they’re 50 years old because they’ve had these weird experiences, and their faces are really dark and cold. And the way they make me feel is how I want my viewers to feel when they’re looking at my paintings.”

Alter says she uses her family because it’s easier to start with things that are most familiar to her. Before this work, Alter had never drawn or painted human forms. Her past work is mostly abstract, but for these paintings she wanted to explore materialistic issues more directly and honestly.

n a work she nicknames the “elevator painting”—that’s what a lot of viewers have told her it looks like—Alter plays up the idea of “mental confusion dressed in privilege.” The girl in the picture is wearing makeup and her skin looks as though it’s aging, but she’s just a little girl.

Eventually Alter says she’d like to branch out to other classes and cultures of people. “I know ethnic background has a lot to do with how people are raised, so I’d really like to research that too,” she says.

But for now, Alter is sticking close to home, dealing with the issues that have been bottled up inside of her for years. “These aren’t meant to be pity pictures,” she says. “I’m not trying to say ‘look what happened to me;’ I’m just trying to express what I know and use it as a vehicle to paint with.”

Next: "a history as spoken by the people"
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