Edinburgh Fringe 2025
Beth Knight: Who Told You to Be Small?
Beth Knight
Genre: Comedy, Painting, Solo Performance
Venue: Just Out Of The Box at Just the Tonic at The Caves
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
Why should women look like sexy waifs? Part stand-up comedy, part lecture in art, Beth has come a long way in accepting her body, challenging the beauty myth and owning her talent.
Review
Do naked women draw in an audience? Always. What about paintings of naked women? Probably. What about paintings of naked women that are not… not… not as beautiful as we are used to from looking at paintings that men have made of naked and usually white women in the last hundreds of years? That is what we saw on the poster for this show and why we have come. The question is: who told you to be small? Why should women look like sexy waifs?
Beth Knight is a painter and she has a lot to say about the subject of paintings of women (and of dogs, and of penises). Her chatty and friendly show is part stand-up comedy, part lecture in art and even though it is peppered with really funny jokes, it is also at times quite harrowing.
Beth guides us through the difficult career choices she had to make, trying to make art and to earn a living. She uses the term “pay to play, right?” when using her own money to get her art seen, a phrase that makes most Fringe artists wince and nod in sympathy, hardly anyone makes money here. Using her laptop connected to a large TV Beth shows us the images of many famous and not so famous paintings. We might find some of them very good but she cleverly turns our expectations upside down, not only about art, but also about life: like every good daughter she is “very afraid of her mum.”
All artists are worried about what their parents might think of them, Beth had to worry about what everyone on Insta and Facebook was going to say when she bravely put something out there that wouldn’t usually be seen. That time it wasn’t a painting of a dog.
Even if you are a relatively privileged white woman, making paintings is expensive but exposing an ultra realistic painting you made of yourself if you don’t believe that you are slim and beautiful is a scary proposition. Beth has come a long way in accepting her body, challenging the beauty myth and owning her talent. Her talk is timely – today, at last, fashion ads are being pulled for depicting models that are deemed unhealthily thin.
