Since the 1970s, Joan Semmel has centered her practice around representations of the body from the female perspective, often taking her own body as subject. In her most recent series of paintings, her body fills the canvas in a manner that echoes the in-camera cropping of the photographs she takes as the basis for her compositions. In Time Out (2021), Semmel captures herself at rest. Leaning on the back of a chair, her painted nude body twists and collapses, celebrating color and flesh while highlighting the aging process. “We all have some difficulty in confronting our aging physical selves,” Semmel says, “so when you are painting yourself in that position, it really means that you have to say, ‘I’m doing this and I’m not going to make it pretty. I’m not going to hide it, disguise it, no face-lifts. It’s going to be really the way I see it.’ This is not a disease that’s happening. It’s the natural evolution of a person.”