The first time I went to watch a cosmetic surgery operation it was to observe a facelift.
As a portraitist, it seemed a fascinating opportunity to literally see the inner workings of something I’d spent so much of my working life studying from the other side.
I’ve always been fascinated by how much our personalities and moods are communicated non-verbally, much of it through facial expressions we aren’t always conscious of making or noticing in others. The moment we start changing the underlying architecture of our outward appearances, and especially when it affects the muscles of our faces, there are inevitably going to be changes to the signals we are transmitting without meaning to.
Clearly these procedures have improved dramatically in recent years and often have profound benefits, but we have also become more used to seeing people, often in the public eye, who have made changes that distort our sense of who they are.
I’ve been working with plastic surgeons on a series of paintings about the ability to enhance our appearance through facelifts and other cosmetic procedures. These works, which depict procedures such as facelifts, breast enhancements and gender reassignments, form the basis of Skin Deep, a new book and exhibition I’ve just opened at the Bowes Museum.
They were initially intended to explore the realities of operations themselves, but I gradually became aware that, in many ways, they were also telling a wider story about the contemporary psyche. The pressures we imagine to look more youthful, more beautiful or more glamorous, which we feel from other people, from fashion imagery, from social media and (perhaps most of all) from ourselves, have coincided with a time when cosmetic medical advances have given us a wide array of options to actively make changes our appearance that weren’t possible even a generation ago.
Another aspect I found intriguing was the fact that these surgeons have to have an aesthetic sensibility, an ability to visualise how someone’s appearance can be changed in a way that will improve it. In a sense, the surgeon is also sculpting, albeit with a human body rather than a block of clay or marble. Some viewers have picked up a reference to this in the surgical pre-op markings in some of the paintings, which, divorced from the rather dramatic preview they give of the precise incisions to follow, have a decorative and almost tribal look about them. They are also, quite literally, drawings which, again, is something more associated with art than medicine.
Several of the early works are “before and after” diptychs showing the same patient before and after operations, mostly breast enhancements. The fact the audience was split with roughly half preferring the unchanged bodies underlines the fact that surgery is based on individual preferences, in particular those of patient and surgeon.
The exhibition includes some portraits of surprisingly young and already beautiful faces about to go under the knife. The idea was to reflect the fact that it’s often the last people who seem in need of change who are most susceptible to the idea that perfection is within their grasp. In retrospect, the unifying theme is, perhaps inevitably, these pressures on us and the lengths we are prepared to go to pursue the ever-changing notion of ideal beauty.
• Jonathan Yeo: Skin Deep at The Bowes Museum is on until 17 June
