If you look quickly at Lee Price’s hyperrealistic paintings, you might mistake them for photographs. But the 44-year-old upstate–New York artist would rather you focus on the subject matter than the technique, which is, for the most part, women and food. Price, who studied painting at Philadelphia’s Moore College of Art, has a long held fascination with the intersection of these two subjects, inspired by her own experience. “The food thing came up because I’ve had issues with food ever since I was very young, and body image issues. I was always very thin but always trying to lose weight,” she says. “They’re very personal paintings.” In fact, the images—bird’s-eye views of women surrounded by luscious-looking desserts or the crumpled wrappers of a junk-food binge—are all self- portraits, painted from photographs of the artist. The life-size works show Price, often nude or in underwear, in unusual eating situations, like sprawled across a bed shoving a pastry in her mouth or crouched in the bath tub holding a full pie. On one level, her work is about compulsivity: the aerial view is meant to conjure the sensation of watching oneself engage in a compulsive behavior and being unable to stop it. That aspect seems to resonate for many— Price often hears her work referred to as “binge paintings” or “bulimia paintings.” But she asserts that the images of women in repose surrounded by unrestricted portions of decadent treats can also be seen as a kind of liberation from the constant monitoring of food choices that so many engage in. “In this society, there’s so much pressure for women to be thin. We’re not supposed to have appetites—and not just for food, but for a lot of things. We’re the givers and not the consumers, and I think some of my recent paintings are about the women staring at the viewers and saying, ‘I’m not going to censor my appetite,’” says Price.

Read the full article and see additional paintings here: Eat. Drink. One Woman: