Ah Mary! How I love her. Some of her favorite subjects are mothers with their babies doing mundane every day things, but she can capture a look in the woman's eye or an accidentally marvelous pose of the limbs and it becomes extravagantly beautiful and moving. Fat infants being bathed or reaching to caress a face, the morning toilette, the mixed splashy patterns of rug, dress and wall papers. At the risk of extreme cheesiness, seeing these women make the same adoring faces and gestures that I make on a daily basis is almost like time travel.
In our modern world I sometimes feel that all the good dirty wholesomeness of human life has been lost with the advent of television, the internet, cars, running water, microwaves. We scarcely even sweat anymore, unless we pay a gymnasium to let us do repetitive motions on a machine in an air conditioned room in order to sculpt our bodies to look amazing at the beach- which we slaved away hunched at a desk all year and flew a plane in order to reach. Even a mere one hundred years ago people were fit because they looked after crops, made their own furniture, chopped firewood, milked cows. They read anything they could get their hands on, taught themselves music and drawing and they rode horses for fun. I'm not entirely anti-technology, I mean- this is a blog after all full of digital pictures taken with a camera that works black devil magic. However, we all seem to think that we get smarter and smarter each generation because new things to help us be more comfortable keep being invented. It's all a lie!
Have you ever read the Bronte sisters? The books they wrote before the age of 25 would shame any English speaking blogger today. There are a million other examples, including native Americans and their herbal cures or the 1839 McGuffey's Reader (meant for ages 7-8) not to mention those pesky pyramids, but what I'm actually trying to say is that these paintings give me hope because I am just like these women. Nothing much has really changed when you can still see the intense love between mother and child. It is a wild, wolfish, ancient love and technology hasn't managed to killed it yet.
These are really tender and kind of inspiring! I was only familiar with Cassat's more famous images.
ReplyDeleteI'm not a luddite, but I wish we knew how to do more with our hands, to create, instead of having this constant feed of others' creativity (which can inspire but also invite a lot of comparison) which seems so internal and never is externalized. Like being trapped in your head a lot, and there's this innate human desire to give it outward life.
Thanks for writing about it!
Aww, Evan and I talk about stuff like this all the time. I want to do a painting similar to this style from a photo of Ruby and I, taking liberties with our costumes of course. :)
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