Cleavage

Marco Livingstone comments, 'On a visit to New York in 1964 Hockney remarked to Jones on the resemblance between his recent hermaphrodite paintings and a specific illustration in a fetish magazine. Jones was intrigued and began to collect this kind of illustration as source material for his paintings, appreciating it both for 'the vitality of this kind of drawing of the human figure, which had been produced outside the fine art medium', and for its elimination of all 'extraneous line or information'. Such images served him directly for some pictures painted on his return to England, which were exhibited as a group at Arthur Tooth, London in 1967. Each of these works, such as First Step (1966), Wet Seal (1966) and Sheer Magic (1967), pictures a life-size fragment of the female anatomy tightly encased in latex or rubber - whether just a foot and calf or a complete pair of legs - with a stiletto-heeled shoe shown as if resting on a plastic shelf that juts out from the lower edge of the canvas. The illusionistic modelling of the anatomy, together with the detailed rendering of the folds in the tautly stretched synthetic material, adds to the sexual charge of the image by concentrating attention of both its tactility and fetishistic associations' (Pop Art A Continuing History, London, 1990, p. 173).