Full disclosure—I adore the way that Browntopink portrays women. You don’t have to scroll through NFT art sites for long to find images of women doing explicit—or simply bizarre—things with/to their bodies. (In some cases, one can only assume that certain creators are DIY-ing their own soft-core porn and then trying to pass it off as art to the rest of us.) In contrast, Browntopink’s work presents the female form as the subject, not an object; the women in her pieces are the actors, not acted-upon. Her aesthetic is unmistakably feminist—in the sense that arguing that a woman can be the protagonist, author and narrator of her own story is apparently still a feminist idea. But this makes perfect sense, since Browntopink herself explains that her pieces “clearly take influence from that of fairy tales with a modern twist.”

Her aesthetic is unmistakably feminist—in the sense that arguing that a woman can be the protagonist, author and narrator of her own story is apparently still a feminist idea.

Fairy tales as we know them today were invented by a group of aristocratic Parisian women in the late 17th century.* Perhaps the most influential of these was the Baroness d’Aulnoy (born Marie-Catherine de Barneville in Normandy in 1650) who became famous throughout Paris for the colorful, magical tales she told in her Rue Saint-Benoit salon as early as 1685. At that time, storytelling for a salon audience was an extremely dangerous business. The ornate language and fantastic settings were typically used to disguise political arguments and caricatures that, if recognized, could lead to exile or imprisonment. More importantly, fairy tales provided a coded framework for women to comment on the social problems of their day: arranged marriages, financial dependence, limited access to education, lack of legal rights and social mobility.

The original versions of classic tales such as “Snow White,” “Sleeping Beauty” and “Cinderella” feature real-world conflicts: forced marriage, sexual violence, death in childbirth. And the most memorable fairytale heroines mirror the real women who created them: beauty often gets them into trouble, while their brains are what gets them out of it. The fairy tales that have come down to us from the French salon tradition anticipate a version of the world where marriage, education and vocation are a matter of free choice; they are sketches drawn by women fighting to be seen as they see themselves, as they wish to be portrayed. In this sense, Browntopink’s aesthetic both absorbs and reflects the feminist realities of the literary fairy tale tradition.

The most memorable fairytale heroines mirror the real women who created them: beauty often gets them into trouble, while their brains are what gets them out of it.

Though every listing in Browntopink’s current Makersplace collection is worthy of attention, I focus here on just three: “She didn’t bite the apple.” “After Party” and “Onírico.” Each image is a story in miniature, complete with character, plot and setting. Together, these three pieces offer a clear view of the artist’s references, perspective and technique.

“She didn’t bite the apple.” presents Eve as the queen of an alternate Eden, naked without shame, her body draped with a translucent bubble-gum pink python; in this rendition, the conniving serpent is reduced to a child’s plaything, something rather like an inflatable pool toy. Eve’s crown, studded with berry-red jewels, has slipped down over her eyes to rest on her perfectly-chiseled cheekbones; she is blissfully blind, still innocent of any knowledge of good and evil.

The garden grass beneath her feet transitions almost imperceptibly from blood red to emerald green; the aqua-paneled walls behind her are traced with thorny golden briars; the Lucite chair in which she sits seems to conduct light and color rather than simply reflect it. When you zoom out to take in the details of the room, the archetypal nature of the woman at its center comes into focus: unfallen Eve, emancipated Sleeping Beauty, the princess unafraid of the forbidden room.

In “After Party,” Browntopink gives us a barefoot, nude, metamodern Cinderella—a figure shimmering with melancholy, emerald mascara streaks staining her cheeks. Helium-filled balloons in shades of green and gilt surround her kneeling form; clouds of golden fog hover against the garnet damask curtains in the background. But the detail in this piece that still stuns me is the sequins on the balloons. It’s a sticky, imaginative choice that’s executed brilliantly. I can only imagine the technical skill needed to direct the gradients of light on each individual sequin, or to create the coral-colored reflections of the carpet below. Look closely and you’ll see: “After Party” isn’t a portrait at all; it’s a retelling, a seeing-new. Browntopink chooses one of the most familiar of all female characters, then offers us the chance to peer into her story through a wholly different lens.

I’ve spent hours now with “Onírico”—Spanish for “dreamlike”—and I still find the color work simply breathtaking. The dreamer, a lingerie-clad young woman with electric violet hair, sits on an L-shaped sofa in the center of a flooded room, surrounded by choppy sapphire waves. Her left hand is stretched toward a school of incandescent yellow fish, swimming through a haze of canary-colored smoke in the air above her head; the walls behind her are a saturated tomato red. Never have blue, red and yellow seemed both so primary and so sophisticated. In contrast, the white sofa and iridescent silver pillows are simply a blank canvas, pulling and reflecting the wash of colors in the room into a spectrum of pastels. “Onírico” is so richly drawn and shaded that you feel like you could slip straight through the screen and into the suspended reality on the other side.

Every scene is soaked with color, crackling with life, and yet the stories they share with us are subtle, complex, more than modern.

Ultimately, what really moves me in these pieces is the utter fearlessness of their narrative and artistic choices; this is art that argues. Browntopink’s work is dimensional, unexpected, dense with full-realized detail; every scene is soaked with color, crackling with life, and yet the stories she shares with us are subtle, complex, more than modern. By placing the female form at the core of her art, she makes a clear argument for the equality and centrality of female perspectives. Like Baroness d’Aulnoy and the other godmothers of the literary fairy tale movement, Browntopink is telling her own story about women, and she is holding nothing back.

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Notes:

*In one of those infuriating turns of history, Charles Perrault has long been given credit for a literary movement created by women some twenty years before he published his edited, sanitized versions of their original stories.

Sources:

Images from the Browntopink Makersplace collection used with the artist’s permission.

Title page: Contes des Fées, Countess d'Aulnoy, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Frontispiece: Contes des Fées, Countess d'Aulnoy, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons