'Girl Hunter': Georgia Pellegrini shoots, cooks and eats
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Georgia Pellegrini is presented as "a smart sex kitten who can field dress a buck and serve it for dinner without breaking a sweat." -
The idea that pretty women could know their way around a gun has gained popularity lately.
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The cover image of Georgia Pellegrini's "Girl Hunter" is fashioned after those old master portraits, the purpose of which is not so much to show what someone looks like, but to display who they are. The tools of one's trade, or the landscape which supplies the subject with his or her title, are given prominence in an improbable pose, in order to demonstrate in a visual shorthand exactly what skills he or (rarely) she has.
So it is that we find Ms. Pellegrini standing knee-deep in undergrowth against a backdrop of trees and clouds. She is clad in a girly pink plaid shirt and a heavy butcher's apron. She is holding in one hand a heavy cast iron skillet, and in the other a large hunting rifle. Although she stares directly out at the viewer, her expression is utterly blank.
Da Capo Press ($24).
Among the skills displayed here -- she's a chef who can handle a gun -- perhaps the most subtle is this ability to appear to bear these two tools of her trade, which must weigh a ton (I know the skillet does), effortlessly. Inside one can only imagine her thinking get the shot off quick before my arm falls off! -- a sentiment that can apply both to standing stock still for a photo and waiting breathlessly to fire upon a tasty elk.
Of course, in the paintings, the trick is not simply in getting all the important elements in the picture, but in the surface detail. Here, it has been enhanced considerably with Photoshop rather than paints and varnish, to give her a supernatural glow. The selective application of surface blur (porcelain skin!) and color balance (hello blue eyes!) has not just been reserved for the book's cover, however. Inside, it's all a little polished to present the author as today's Superwoman -- a smart sex kitten who can field dress a buck and serve it for dinner without breaking a sweat.
First Published February 5, 2012 12:00 am
