Sweet uncultured swine!
How has my week been? I just cut my own hair if that gives you an impression of my present mental state. I read the British Vogue interview with Suki Waterhouse (you can see where this is headed) and her voluminous wolf cut and curtain bangs… try as I did to emulate this woman, I could not. So the Aldi Version Of Suki Waterhouse is writing to you today about the clutches of jealousy and what it can make a woman trim, purchase or, in the case of the artists below, throw. Refill your espressos and scroll on.
I’m feeble and self-effacing in all areas of my life, bar two. I’m a complete wanker about the shape of my belly button (it’s smol and cute) and my inability to be jealous romantically. When my big ex got into his next serious relationship, I’d felt almost nothing. No stress over them being cute together or even smooshing booties, I thought I was pathologically broken until I learned information that finally unstuck me. She was a musician.
Creative jealousy is a special kind of vulnerability. Have my ex mans but do </3 not </3 be a more accomplished songwriter than me. This feeling of creative envy is uncomfortable, egotistical, and apparently, endemic. The obvious pop-culture reference to insert here would be the recent Charlie XCX and Lorde collaboration on Girl, so confusing. But I’m about as cutting edge as a pair of plastic scissors, so I’m exploring a rift between two artists who are long dead instead.
Thea Proctor and Margaret Preston were, and still are, culturally synonymous with one another. Their paintings couldn’t be more different but they both had a vagina so as far as twentieth-century artistic elites were concerned, they were practically the same person. As the only few women tolerated by Sydney’s creative enclave of the late 1800’s to mid-1900’s, comparison was destined to be drawn.
Proctor had an upper-middle class upbringing in Bowral, New South Wales, where she was encouraged to paint from a young age. She was attractive, stylish and, as expected from the first Australian woman to exhibit in the Venice Biennale, incredibly talented. Replete with a gracious and kind disposition, she was easily hateable. In 1925, Proctor returned home from her successes abroad to exhibit with her equally talented Sydney contemporary.
Once described as a ‘red-headed little firebrand’ (what?), Preston was um… less refined. Not from as privileged a background as Proctor, she became an artist later, but by 1925, was no less accomplished. She taught art to acclaim, and was the first coloniser to paint native Australian motifs in a way that didn’t make the stale art institutions gag. Both travelled extensively and were inspired by modernist techniques unsurprisingly shunned by Sydney’s fine arts scene.
It makes sense then, considering a shared taste in modernism and their both having wombs, that they should exhibit together. Preston and Proctor’s hopes were to interest the public, get the dried up old c*nts at the Art Gallery of New South Wales to purchase their work and in doing so, holistically embrace modernism. They were successful on both accounts. Though, by ‘they’ I really mean Proctor, the only artist of the two who’d managed to sell a piece.
To celebrate their collaboration, the girlies had planned a little post-exhibition brunch. After learning only Proctor’s work was purchased by the trustees, Preston grabbed some cake and threw it at her face. I can be a grown-up here and argue that the patriarchy always made us feel like there are finite places for talented women and Preston should’ve saved her baked goods for the real fight, but it wouldn’t stop me wanting to know if it was a Victoria sponge or chocolate mud.
I’ve arrived at the end of my little anecdote with no satisfying conclusion on how to feel, or what to do, about the cursed green monster. Jealousy happens when our figurative bellies are most exposed; our appearance, our desires, our intimate relationships. I’ve watched my most stoic friends crumble over some beautiful creature they believed had sex with their average as fuck boyfriend (Oh. Oh, honey. No). But to give an impression of just how important our art is to us: under no circumstance has a man ever made me, or my friends, throw cake.
POSTSCRIPT: Some uncultured swine whom are very dear to me (on and offline) have pledged $coinsss$ toward Dis Content.
Firstly! I want to say a massive thank you - any creative will tell you how difficult it can be to advocate your value and you lovely folk did it for me.
Secondly! Unless I choose to $monetise$ Dis Content and opt for paid subscriptions, I can’t access these funds. If Substack has charged you - please let me know! (you may just reply to this email) otherwise, roll on knowing you’ve made my day.
Finally! At this stage, I don’t plan to monetise - either way lots of content will remain free and its deplorable quality unchanged <3. My abstract plan is to create a podcast/vids which might be behind like a $3 paywall or maybe have some ads thrown in idk? Let me know if either of those mediums interest you??!!
Thank you all so so much for reading, I love our chic friendship so much. Thank you to Grace for editing <3
C U Next Tuesday xxxxxxxx Maggie Jean xxxxooxoxoxxo
The musician in question here, don't worry, he brutally dumped me 🤷♀️ lol (yes, I'm aware how unhinged it is of me to be lurking here)