How Columbia's Zoe Hawk reaches back into the world of girlhood, one painting at a time
Zoe Hawk paints like a seasoned choreographer, or perhaps an auteur just moments before calling "action."
Rich with characterization, Hawk's compositions draw attention to the way people — typically young women — relate to one another in physical space. Her subjects wear stylish garments, but also expressions of disgust or indifference, disaffection or outright fear. And they are clearly posed, but not yet pretending to belong to the moment or feel like themselves within its confines.
Attention to the patterns and colors of vintage clothing, a rare gift for scene-setting and subtle dramatic sense allow Hawk's paintings to shed light on the starburst joys and quiet tremors of girlhood, socially-constructed ideals of femininity, and the ways we do or don't feel comfortable within our little worlds.
"I like that feeling of theatricality," Hawk said. "It sort of implies the characters are in a dream space, or they’re in a more metaphorical space. It alludes to performance, how we perform socially, how we perform with our clothes — our clothes are like costumes."
This striking unity between style and substance draws eyes to Hawk's paintings, here at home in Columbia; across the country, where her work has been exhibited and featured widely in publications; and on social-media platforms like Instagram, where she has 12,000 followers.
Fashion is a passion — and more
A St. Louis native, Hawk earned a bachelor's degree in studio art from Missouri State University, then a master's degree in painting from the University of Iowa. Each step fanned creative sparks from childhood.
Hawk enjoyed creative play in retro dress-up clothes and gravitated toward the atmospheric details in her mother's yearbook photos. Today, as Hawk prepares to paint in the garage studio shared with her husband, the painter and gallery owner Joel Sager, she sifts inspiration found in vintage children's books as well as midcentury magazines and catalogs.
Images from this passageway through the 20th century transmit feminine ideals and social expectations that still resonate.
"There’s just something about the ‘50s and the candy-colored pastels that I feel like just as metaphor in the painting really works," Hawk said.
Considering how young women navigate society still, she avoids painting characters in contemporary fashion. The clothes of today immediately date a painting, she said, but also obscure more timeless concerns.
"The distance lets you see it in a different way," Hawk said.
Clothing is a source of great beauty and color in Hawk's paintings, and also fulfills the phrase "status symbol," showing how young women make meaning through their dress, and craft messages about how and who they are.
Fashion may be a means of outside control, self-expression, or both at once, Hawk's paintings show. She recalled studying the uniforms young indigenous women were forced to wear in boarding schools. White officials used the clothes to "police" bodily autonomy, Hawk said, but often the girls altered their uniforms to become objects of daily defiance.
Hawk's paintings collect, then whisper these truths — both the consoling and discomfiting.
Painting the pivot points of adolescence
Hawk paints the moments just before, between or beyond crucial pivot points of adolescence.
The best childhoods proceed at a wondrous, magical pace, Hawk said; and even the best childhoods tilt from that axis, toward uncertainty over what comes next and questions of belonging.
"You get to that point where you start to have these realizations about the world and things start to feel different and your ground gets a little shaky," Hawk said.
She intends to paint the both/and of those moments: the joy which remains, and the unease which arises. Sometimes viewers apologize for reading the work as both beautiful and creepy, Hawk said, a simple proof she is striking a proper balance.
So much of adulthood is informed by these pivotal moments, Hawk said, and her work not only calls our attention back to these formative times but to the ways they still work on and through us.
Her impeccable control as an artist makes these reckonings unavoidable — and more luminous than they would be elsewhere. Hawk's settings hearken back to Hitchcock-era cinema, where a painted backdrop might reveal its artifice; her hand, like a choreographer's or even a girl playing with her dollhouse, arranges characters in groups and quietly virtuosic solos, spotlighting relationship, she said.
Making the work, Hawk experiences contemplation but also child-like wonder, at achieving a dream pink or accessing a certain emotion. She hopes viewers know the same feeling.
Sometimes, passersby at an exhibit will point to a character in Hawk's paintings, assigning kinship with themselves or a friend. Hawk wants this to happen for young women, adult women and those who came of age with no feminine experience at all, she said. We are all still in the process of growing up, and growing into our beauty.
Learn more about Hawk's work at https://www.zoehawk.com/.
Aarik Danielsen is the features and culture editor for the Tribune. Contact him at adanielsen@columbiatribune.com or by calling 573-815-1731. He's on Twitter/X @aarikdanielsen.
This article originally appeared on Columbia Daily Tribune: How Zoe Hawk's paintings examine the lifelong implications of girlhood
