Artist’s Statement

Hope Beliveau is a Toowoomba based artist graduating with a Bachelor of Creative Arts at USQ. Her practice is concerned with female portraiture and decorative excess. The portraits attempt to hover between sentiment and sincerity – pushing toward a kitsch excess while applying restraint. Media frequently used include charcoal on toned paper, watercolour, acrylic and coloured pencil drawings as well as occasionally experimenting with digitally editing and augmenting the form. Her focus on female portraiture stems from her interest in an intuitive response to the female form.
Fashion and beauty found across popular culture drive creativity and diversity of approaches to her subject matter. The artist has always found observing societal beauty standards and trends to be an abiding interest. Her work has evolved from being more focussed on the organic body as a whole, to her more recent works that focus almost exclusively on faces.
Currently she is exploring the ideas of utopian ideals and the concept of what is perfect or considered pretty. Hope’s works reference Pop Surrealist styles by exaggerating female features to make them more doll-like, thereby making their beauty unachievable, almost comical in their contrived perfection. In this way, she comments on beauty standards in westernised cultures.