Poll results thus far clearly indicate that readers of The Pagan Sphinx are 51% supportive of naked nymphs as blog decor. Only one voter asked for a Surrealist painting but I do have a tendency to listen to the minorities and would be happy to change it to something really trippy by, say, Leonor Fini or Leonora Carrington. One of these days, but for now Nymphs triumph.
Seven, or 24% of readers voted to "keep it nude", so they should be satisfied with the Bougereau for a while longer. But never worry about a lack of nudity in art around here! The Friday Evening Nudes is coming up, as promised.
Portrait of his wife Suzanne Valadon, also a painter
one of her own nudes is placed below
Suzanne Veladon
French
1865-138
That example and the one below it should lay to waste the narrow-minded assumption that only men painted the female nude and that all nude modeling is sexual in nature and/or a type of enslavement of women by the patriarchy (or some other archaic nonsense! ;-)
Leonor Fini
see my post about her work and tidbits from her life here
Traditional still life painting usually features subject matter such as arrangements of food, flowers or objects. Women surrealists reworked still life to challenge how women's roles and bodies have traditionally been represented. They often draw comparisons between body parts and food, using surrealist puns and juxtapositions to 'dish up' the objectification of women in a male-dominated world.
Some artists used found materials and animal matter such as wood, cork, coral and embalmed birds to assemble beautiful, but sinister surreal objects. Other artists put themselves into the artwork, such as Francesca Woodman’s torso in her photograph Three Kinds of Melon and Mimi Parent's own hair in the object Maitresse.
taken from the Manchester Art Gallery Website, where there is currently an exhibit of women surrealists that I would dearly love to visit - but a web visit is the next best thing, and in fact, the only thing. ;-)
Greetings from Pagan Sphinx land. The heart and soul I put into my art posts needed a bit of nourishment today, so I'm coming by to say hello and tell you how it's going. In a word, my studies are rather dry. One is reading instruction related, the other math related ( oh, joy). The way I'm accustomed to working with children when it comes to pre-reading, emergent and early reading goes entirely out the window while taking courses to help the deficient reader. Out goes the fun of bringing a story to life through drama, art and the sheer joy of enjoying a great story and its illustrations while lying on the floor with little ones' hands on their chins as they are held mesmerized. If I become a special education teacher, I will have to find more fun ways of teaching reading that still get the skills in or I fear I shall wither and die along with my students. And there-in the problem lies for me. And if regular public education weren't standardized and boring enough, special education is twice as much so.
Why I am doing this, you ask? I'm doing it for the kids who are falling further and further behind so that one day they may be able to enjoy reading and learning on their own terms and not just to satisfy a bar imposed on them by the bureaucracy that is public education.
I'm doing it for myself, too. I'm trying to conquer my fear of the public education machine. Suffice it to say that I have to stay in public education because to go back to private-non-profit would mean working for a stipend. Been there, done that and flat broke. For those of you who are unfamiliar with education, yes, there is in fact another sphere of education where the pay is even less than the public school system.
I've strayed far-off! One of my classes is not too bad. The other is gruel with sop ( I did mention rumination. Sorry.) I have gruel with sop twice a week and I have to drive over an hour to get it. It's a long story and going any further about it, will only make it likely that I will break out in hives.
I have a new avatar (above) Not that you'll be seeing it much, since I'll be blogging hardly at all for the next couple of months, as some of you who read my last post know. It's a detail from a painting by Surrealist Leonor Fini.
I am smitten!
There is another surrealist by the name of Remedios Varo who has really caught my fancy, as well. I wish I had time to compose an image-laden post on her work but as it is, I'm already taking liberties with my limited by time by putting this out to share with you.
But I'm glad I did. :-)
All the love,
Ms. Sphinx
Remedios Varo
And here is Music for Sunday: Suzanne Vega's song Ironbound.
Yes, there was André Breton, Dali and di Chirico. But have you ever heard of Surrealist Leonor Fini?
August 30, 1908, Buenos Aires, Argentina - January 18, 1996, Paris, France) was an Argentine surrealist painter, graphic artist, costume and set designer and author
I want to share with you some snippets from various sources about the creative and accentric Leonor Fini.
"In Paris she became a legend almost overnight. When one of the Surrealists saw a painting of hers in a Paris gallery in 1936 and sought out its creator, she arranged a rendezvous in a local cafe and arrived dressed in a cardinal's scarlet robes, which she had purchased in a clothing store specializing in clerical vestments. 'I liked the sacrilegious nature of dressing as a priest, and the experience of being a woman and wearing the clothes of a man who would never know a woman's body.'
Like Da Vinci, she learned anatomy through the studying of corpses which she found in Trieste morgues.
Just like Dali, Fini rejected the Surrealists' offer to join their group. She saw the group's obsession with treatise and theories not as radical, but as a manifestation of what Dali called "typical petit bourgeois mentality. Leonor Fini webpage
Do ya think? ;-)
Fini
(in her work-a-day get-up) ;-)
For her, surrealism was beyond manifestos and theories. In the sexual realm, she found the group homophobic and misogynist despite its endeavors to idealize women and liberate sexual desire without the interference of morality.
Fini's extensive oeuvre has been an invaluable contribution to the development of a modern feminine consciousness, but her version differed somewhat from the other women surrealists. In contrast with Remedios Varo's ideal woman, Fini's was not cerebral, mystical or ironic but authoritarian, sensual, and governed by passion. She portrays them in an almost Amazonian sense: as goddesses, warriors, and voluptuaries.
Men are often portrayed as lithe figures who are under the protection of her females.
The sphinx and cats play major parts in her paintings, as does the theme of 'the double'. She was equally adept at etching, drawing, watercolor and oil painting. Wikipedia
She lived with many cats; up to a total of 23 at one time. The illness of one of her cats could send her into a deep depression.
"When the Amherst sphinx styled herself a pagan, she meant she didn’t believe in the biblical God. What sort of deity, if any, she did believe in is hard to pinpoint." -- Gary Sloan, "Emily Dickinson: Pagan Sphinx,"
I believe that the images and writing posted here fall under the "fair use" section of the U.S. copyright law http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#107, as they are intended for educational purposes and are not in a medium that is of commercial nature.
.jpg)
