FOR this painting, titled A Baroque Ode to the Lipstick Feminists’ Attack on a Village, some might have to google “lipstick feminism” to get an idea of what the painting is about, or claims to be about, allegorically. As to the “Baroque” in the title, it is only presumed that many in today’s art world know what the Baroque has really been all about.

    So, okay: the onset of the Baroque era actually made it almost a rule for paintings to have black backgrounds . . . in order for Baroque works to dramatize further their Catholic Church-centered narratives. But what de Veyra did here places his non-Baroque narrative in a sort of night hour, not for drama alone but also for a kind of literalness.

    First, back to the Baroque issue. For those who’ve forgotten their art history, the Baroque was like this: the Catholic Church instigated the Baroque manner to put more drama into Christian painting as a reaction against the Reformation’s calls for iconoclasm. Thus, to spite the Reformation, Baroque art made it a rule to further highlight icons or human dramatic figures and their narrative drama by using the most visceral of backgrounds: black.

    In de Veyra’s painting, however, the black background is used to signify both a literal night time (for his “bombing”) and a literal night life (as in “red light” nights) firstly, and then to put more drama into those very same scenes only secondly—the scenes of a fictional machine gun attack by a B-52 bomber (or B-25 bomber) and of one associating lipstick-feminist sexiness with night life.

    The B-25 bomber is flying over a village, and the center of that village looks like a Catholic church (that building in the middle with the two spires; the source of this image is actually a photo by William Garnett, the church in which had only one spire).

​    We could say that the image is almost literally machine-gunning the Church. If so, then this is Baroque turned against its inventors.

    But with the bottles of lipstick juxtaposed in another plane of the painting, little lipstick bottles in a row appearing like a collection of bullets, and then with the prompt from the painting’s title saying “lipstick feminists attacking,” the viewer should be led to make the connection that the bullets in the machine gun are not real bullets but only sardonic bottles of lipstick.

    So, the lipstick in the painting is made to literally represent lipstick feminists. But, wait. Lipstick feminists are not actually being attacked by the Catholic Church, as far as we know, are they? But here’s the thing. Yes, lipstick feminists have not traditionally been a target of the Roman Catholic Church, as far as we know, but culturally they’ve actually been. Not by the Church itself but by the devout Catholic community, especially the one in conservative United States, most radically toward their stand on sexiness, rape and abortion. Of course, if there’s a Christian sect that has targeted lipstick feminists more, it’s been the conservative evangelical Right (the Christian Right), as much as the ultra-conservative sects of other religions.

    The female figure in the painting is actually a copy of a female clown from a story in Spin magazine, used here to represent a happy, free female under a red light, most likely a music bar.

    Now, it might seem that the lipstick feminists’ supposed “counter-attack” on a village here is quite a literal attack on a literal village. Is the painter endorsing violence? No. The village here is de Veyra’s symbol for a kind of provincialism. Not a literal “village,” because there are villages inhabited by very worldly people. The artist is referring to that unworldly, provincial village that is located not in some province somewhere but between people’s ears, that village between people’s ears rather than something specific that you can find on a map. Now, that village, located between some people’s ears, would actually paint lipstick feminists as demonic elements in our societies, associating their red lipsticks with Satan’s red, and so on and so forth, especially when they’re wearing red miniskirts that according to some moral beliefs would somewhat justify the occurrence of rape upon their wearers. When that association happens from a religious perspective, the atmosphere begins to sound elegiac.

    This is de Veyra’s ode of support to third wave feminism.