In Holding (2020), Joan Semmel employs her own body as subject in a meditation on flesh, using a range of tones to convey the body’s lines and curves in varying light and shadow. The handling of paint foregrounds gestural brushwork stemming back to her roots in Abstract Expressionism. Crossed arms and legs generate a landscape of horizontal lengths against the vertical plane of the torso, while the cropping of the figure echoes Semmel’s technique of employing photography to determine her intimate compositions. Semmel has summarized her intentions thus, “The issues of the body from desire to aging, as well as those of identity and cultural imprinting, have been at the core of my concerns. The carnal nature of paint has seemed to me a perfect metaphor, the specifics of image, a necessary elaboration.”