She is all softness and sweetness, peace, love, wit, and delight. - Defoe

The Cowper Madonna

This painting is really typical Raphael - the colors, the landscape, the composition, the softness of it all. The Madonna is really beautiful - she looks soft and gentle and benign, blonde, graceful, and plump as suited a beautiful woman of her status at that time, plump like a young mother before the pressure to return to size zero pants infiltrated society. I love the softness of Raphael's works - the colors are bright and clear, but still so gentle. Your eyes just ease over the composition.

The name comes from one of the owners, not from anything distinctive about the painting. But to me this one is so distinctive. Madonnas aren't my favorite subject matter - I'm not Catholic, they carry no special meaning for me, and Italian Renaissance painting is FILLED with them. Not just Renaissance - the motif was even more popular in the Italo-Byzantine era. This one speaks to me, though; this one I like. It's because it doesn't look like a normal Madonna & Child painting. There are no halos, no attendants, no worshipers, no angels - just a woman with her infant. She looks like a mom, doesn't she? She's not worshipping the reincarnation of God. She's staring off into the distance, looking tired, with an infant clinging to her neck. She supports him distractedly, out of habit rather than any special or specific care. Her face shows all the difficulties of the life of Mary - her illegitimate pregnancy at a young age, giving birth while far from her home, forced to flee from her native land while her child was still very young. She looks like there's a lot on her mind, as though she's deep in thought but in a few seconds she'll snap out of it, sigh, collect her child and leave to do some important yet menial task demanded by her sex and status. I like this painting so much because she looks less like the divine mother of a deity, and more like today's moms. She looks, not exalted, but normal.

Let's Chant the Sound of Om to Relax the Mind

Graziella Bettinardi - Mandala Eternity

I fell in love with this painting in Italy. It was in the window of a art shop that I walked by frequently, and I wanted it so much. Unfortunately, it was a good €200, plus another €50-100 to ship it back to the US. So instead of buying the canvas mounted on wood, I settled for a print. The canvas would have been much better - there's something about texture in the paint that makes a painting so much more beautiful than a print. Even works that are too abstract or in a style I don't like become somewhat attractive when I can get up close to the work and see the texture. And the gold paint in the tree leaves - a print just can't make that gold shine like the actual paint does. A real canvas also has so much more subtlety in the coloring, shading from one color to the next rather than dividing the color into pixels. Basically the painting is superior to the print in every category except cost.

But even the print has something to offer. A mandala is a geometric design used in Eastern religions as an aid to meditation. The whole painting has that sort of feel. I have a yoga video, and at one point the instructor says "Let's chant the sound of om to relax the mind." And surprisingly enough, just saying that sound clears your head and does actually relax your mind. This painting is the visual equivalent of chanting 'om'. Just staring at it for awhile makes me feel calm and peaceful. The colors are relaxed and focused. It's a painting you can take in reflexively, as a whole, or dissect into pieces and find layers of detail and skill and story. It feels like the concentric rings are both enclosing and expanding, but not trapping or exploding. How did she decide to overlap the trees in some places, and leave that part of the ring open in others? What does the symbol in the center mean - is it the center of the universe (mandalas often represent the universe)? Is it a soul? Is it just nonsense? Why did she texture the squares, making the outside edges thick with paint in random places? I haven't figured out the symbolism in this painting, and maybe there is none - maybe it's supposed to be interpreted by the viewer free of the artist's intentions. Maybe all art is like that.

The Dog Means She'll Be Faithful to You

I think a good way to start off my blog is with one of my favorite paintings - Venus of Urbino, a 16th century oil painting by Titian.

This is her. She is very different from the nudes we see so often in our culture, but you really can't deny that she's incredibly beautiful. It's hard to look away. I think many nudes we see today (especially pornographic nudes) are difficult to look away from in the same way a car wreck is - the metal of the vehicle is twisted and wrecked and destroyed into a new and interesting and sad form, and I think many of the women we are presented with in today's media are the same way. But this Venus is different. She isn't even a goddess - she's a courtier, a wealthy woman waited upon by maids, surrounded by luxurious fabrics and adorned with expensive jewelry. But she is goddess-like: the direct and confident gaze that is still relaxed and unassertive, the casual posture that displays almost all of her smooth and rounded form without appearing cheap or really even sexual. Overall she is much more sensual than sexual, waiting carelessly more than inviting. I wish we could have retained this idea of beauty - partly for selfish reasons (my body would be much more in style), but partly because it seems actually beautiful. It seems today that we have edited so much femininity out of beauty, and then hastily tried to replace that femininity with artifice like silicone and frilly accessories. But this woman - she is completely feminine, completely natural, and completely - unabashedly - nude. She needs nothing to be beautiful. I think that while our modern idea of beauty could benefit from her, our modern idea of femininity (and feminism) could also learn something from this portrait.

Mission Statement

This is where I'll post anything that lets my creative side take over for awhile - poetry, photographs, paintings, architecture, anything that strikes me as artistic. None of it will be my own work. I'm going to start by stealing some poetry by Sappho from another blog I read. I usually don't read poetry in translation, because I believe that form is such an important part of a poem, and the form is often lost when translated. But that isn't such a problem in this case, because Sappho's poetry is incomplete (only fragments of poems remain). Reading her poetry makes me feel that the words only restrain the feeling, rather than expressing it, and being able to read only fragments is like reading the feeling rather than the words.

This is a fantastic translation by Anne Carson, who uses brackets to indicate missing fragments, rather than just filling in the space with what she feels Sappho probably said:
] frequently
] for those
I treat well are the ones who most of all
] harm me
] crazy
]
]
]
] you, I want
] to suffer
] in myself I am
aware of this
]
]

It's so intense. Part of me wants to decipher it, to know the entire poem. But most of me is content with the fragments, to feel the unrestrained emotion and to add to that my own emotions. Fragmented poetry seems almost more interactive, more enticing, less like literature and more like modern art that you impress yourself upon.