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What appears in the glass changes face under different shades of light. The paintings in Tinted Glass by Charlott Weise redesign the theatre of worship. Icons are reconfigured, abstracted away from a fixed sex or identity, while rituals of care and spirit—performed in different hues—chart the female psyche. ‘The risk to remain tight in a bud,’ writes Anaïs Nin, ‘was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.’1 She writes past tense; it needed to happen, don’t look back, just a sidelong glance will do, to indicate that you are turning a corner. The professional hazard of playing yourself entails coming out on a daily basis, looking into the glass, and meeting your maker. The sybarite2 is caught off guard courting danger; her jouissance means she will blossom over and over again after every new, fateful administering of maquillage. She will be recognized in her dressing room mirror as herself by the character she hopes to play.

Bringing blush to the table, the business of soft giggly spirits, gurgliness, and pansies, is part of the apparatus that constitutes the politics of aesthetics. There was a time when powerful heads of state could simply not afford not to perform their leadership in elegant, sanctimonious drag. Julius Caesar—by far the most famous Roman—was a queen before he ruled Rome appearing in drag so as to leave no doubt about his claim to divinity through his lineage to Venus, herself ‘goddess of beauty’ and ancestor of the Roman people. What springs to mind is Beyoncé’s lyric: ‘Diva is the female version of a hustler (2009). Queen B interfaces the Italo-Latin origin3 for the word goddess with the slang term for a low-life criminal.4 Perhaps what Caesar and Beyoncé would agree on is that divas get things done, despite being demanding or difficult to work with. This sense of woman cast forward by the diva is overflowing, and always more than bargained for: a deception for truth’s sake, like Weise’s painted Membrane Dancer’, a glimpse of the essence of femininity before being overruled, something primordially femme.

Rouge is the secret eau de toilette of every sanguine goddess, which becomes available according to the Roman calendar, at that time of the month. Divas in Weise’s paintings are in the company of cherubs, or rather their demonic counterparts, which, for want of a better word, I christen baby-demons.

The oils splash, and are churned out in finely delineated contours of visage whose blush extends beyond the cheeks onstage. A theatrical aside takes place between wigged actors. Perhaps they discuss the viewer, who is by now perched on a stool, applying eyeliner before her fateful denouement in the dressing-room mirror that stares back at her like the all-seeing, mascara-heavy, smokey eye of Saurona—Sauron’s drag persona, the evil, disembodied character from Lord of the Rings. The figures being watched, cheeks puffed from betrayal, are in negotiation with their own spectral sexuality as if peeping out from behind a hand of cards, ready to perform their reading. And like the figures in the court cards, some queens in the paintings appear doubled in top & tail position with their upside-down selves floating alongside other apparitions. The paintings are translucent, using empty portions of the canvas to draw attention to their obverse. The androgyny between the sexes is reminiscent of opera’s golden age, that realm where a star’s longevity was still guaranteed by the divadienst—the diva worship of fans. In this parallel universe of total opera, Gloria Estefan’s well-known contralto, or Britney—contralto-soprano—should, around about now, be approaching their absolute vocal apex—what we might call the red giant phase in terms of the life cycle of a star.

Should there not be a celebration of a star’s laryngeal descent towards the lower frequencies as she matures? Some remember Eve’s fall as the moment when she finally came into her own, her character becoming more tangible and real, as she finally struts her own weight in a true-grit showgirl dernier cri. Speaking of lower vocal registers brings me to the ultimate diva—Dietrich, whose Stygian notes made us gaze deeper into ourselves, beyond the realm of living and into the underworld. Dietrich is the most recognizable reference in Weise’s pantheon, besides Madonna through her older, biblical namesake. Liz Taylor’s Cléopatra bangs are only visceral references, abstracted from pop culture and fan-zines into dream-illustrations of the popular female imagination. Dietrich, embroiled in her masc’uerade, watches us through those crescent moonlit eyebrows and lids, whilst Jagger as lord of the riots, Prince in shining armour, and Bowie in his thin white duke period, tread in her shadow. They are like hungry canine inheritors to her throne, redesigning the styles of courtship. It was in Morocco (1930) that Dietrich famously delivered her trademark pansexual gusto only to follow Gary Cooper, her beloved foreign legionnaire, into the dunes in a pair of spiked heels. Here in the sand, she joins other lovesick women in pursuit of men in uniforms marching away. This surrealist, balletic dream sequence finale is at odds with the sex-defying ‘supreme lover’ role she commanded. But somehow the absurdity of spiked heels in sand says something about the human condition, and elevates her beyond its sphere to the heights of stardom. Complexity makes the diva, whose theater always lies before her, with or without a stage. The divadienst, that is you and I, secure milady’s rentrée; however infrequent the occasion, the more devoted the worship, the more splendid will be this Tina Turner-like comeback, under Turner-esque skies, oh dear, it doesn’t matter which Turner, as long as you turn her! She’ll be back on that stage before you get the chance to say “Break a leg, darlin’!”

2A sybarite is a sensualist and refers to a resident of the ancient city of Sybaris.

3While the word ‘diva’ was originated by the Latin diva, meaning goddess, it gained its contemporary meaning of an enigmatic female leading lady who is demanding, from the Italian opera stage.

4‘Hustler’ is defined as a prostitute, a gambling shark or simply someone who ‘is active and energetic in business, a lively person’. (Merriam-Webster)