Ticklish Situation 1957

Gil Elvgren’s "Ticklish Situation" is a painting made sometime in the 20th century, and it’s a flirtatious dance with the process of looking itself. The texture is smooth, almost impossibly so, as if reality has been photoshopped before photoshop was even a thing. It is this attention to detail and surface that draws us into the image. See the way Elvgren renders the feathers floating in the air; each one is carefully placed to suggest movement and chaos, but also to direct our gaze across the canvas. It's like he's inviting us to play along, to get lost in the sheer artifice of it all. Are we looking at a painting, or a dream, or maybe just a really good ad? Maybe it's all of the above. Art, at its best, embraces these kinds of ambiguities, inviting us to question what we see and how we see it. Like a David Salle piece, Elvgren knows how to tickle our gaze.