I recently visited a friend in the hospital after a major surgery (she's doing fine, thanks for asking), and while there, I noticed that Stanford hospital has an extensive art collection in nearly every medium one could imagine fitting on a wall--oils, tapestries, lithographs, photographs, pen and ink, and woodblock prints, to name a few.
(It's really lovely. If you ever have some time, go peruse at your leisure. Just be aware that, although the hospital itself has no charge, it's not entirely free--you may have to pay for parking.)

As I was leaving the third floor elevator, I noticed, hanging on the wall directly opposite, a woodblock print called "Sky in Cora's Marsh" by Neil Welliver.  I was very taken by it--I'm a sucker for landscape prints, especially woodblock (my art jones is genetic, I swear)--and so, when I got home last night, I looked Welliver up on the internet. Fortunately, there's quite a bit of information on him available, as well as many images to give one an idea of his style and oeuvre.

Early in his career (between about 1960 and 1970-71) he did quite a bit of figurative painting, mainly female nudes set in nature, usually in a pond or river. In the paintings I looked at online, one was lying on her belly in the water, looking up languidly at the viewer, one was sitting on the banks of a creek, another standing in a river up to her thighs, unconcernedly taking a shirt off over her head. All of them seemed youngish, but not so young that they looked like children--I would have guessed them to be in their 20s or early 30s.

As I said before, I'm a landscape whore, but I found myself captivated mainly by Welliver's nudes, and for the longest time, I couldn't figure out why....I wasn't attracted to them nor did I get an erotic charge from them: the figures didn't appear in suggestive poses, but were very tranquil and calm-looking. There was nothing particularly out of the ordinary about them. They weren't what would be physically considered 'beautiful' by modern standards: they were fleshy. They had bellies and thick thighs. They had large rear ends. Instead of a daintily trimmed or waxed pubic area, they all displayed a thick dark patch between their thighs. Their breasts weren't large, or perfectly formed, or perky--they were small, or large, or pointed, or one went one way and one the other. They weren't idealized in any way that I could obviously make out.

So why was I so engrossed by these paintings? Why did I study them so intently?

Finally, I got it:

....they looked like me.

They looked like real women, not the twisted images put forward by the media as the only acceptable standard of beauty. Here was a respected artist--a man--saying, this is beauty. You are beautiful.

None of these women looked in any way uncomfortable with their bodies. What the hell has happened in the last forty years to make us believe otherwise?

I know this is not a new revelation--many many far more well-informed and intelligent people than I have been kicking and screaming about exactly this objectification of women's bodies in the media. But the "OH!!" moment came when I went beyond the intellectual to the personal.

I had never quite believed J (or any of my lovers) when he told me he thought I was beautiful. I never trusted it. I had suspected that, when he started dating someone else, it was obviously because he wanted to be with someone skinnier, and therefore automatically more attractive, than I was. I had deeply internalized that I was somehow less-than beautiful because of my body. It was as if I had compartmentalized myself into two discrete and totally separate pieces: my head, which encompassed my face, my hair, my skin, my brain, my intellect and wit--in short, anything I could see as being in any way acceptable and attractive; and my body, this awkward, lumpy, stretch-marked, scarred, hairy, FAT piece of flesh that was only there as a vehicle for my head. I'd never really seen how clearly that demarcation between the two parts of myself had been.

But.
What if--?
What if, when those men looked at me naked, they saw what I had seen when I looked at the women in Neil Welliver's paintings? --And, more to the point, really DID think I was beautiful?

To look through a man's eyes--and to be seen as attractive--opened MY eyes. How very deeply I had internalized my sense of UNattractiveness based solely on body image...of course, I had gotten all this on an intellectual level--the head had gotten the message--but it had never really filtered down to the part that needed to hear it most.

I hold no illusions that this is going to completely set me free from my negative self-image....but to be able to see my body type through a man's eyes--and in seeing, be told that what I am physically is attractive, is sexy, is beautiful--is huge.

Thank you, Neil Welliver, wherever you are.
RM

For reference, here's a link to a picture of "Sky in Cora's Marsh": http://www.neilwelliver.com/ex2000/prints/sky.htm
And here's a link to an extensive gallery of Welliver's work spanning most of his career, including several of his nudes:
http://alexandregallery.com/artists/worksAvailable/Neil-Welliver

The Forest For the Trees

I had the experience of giving my first recital this past week (I know, I know....it only took HOW long?). It was an education in many ways: I learned the hard way how much WORK it takes to put on a concert (I've produced a concert before but always as a collaborator, not as a principal) and how much energy and stamina it takes to sing an hours' worth of music.

By all accounts it was a smashing success, save one: my own.

I've never had such an experience where my perception of what had occurred was SO different, so diametrically opposed to what others related to me, even as a performer; I could always say "well, THAT piece didn't go so well, but THAT one was all right, yeah?" This time, however, I felt relentlessly negative about my efforts--I remember thinking that my throat was dry despite all the liquids I'd been drinking; I was nervous, which meant my breath support went out the window, requiring me to breathe in places I'd never meant to; my voice felt thick, wooden, not at all flexible or reliable (oh yeah, did I mention that because of the stress of doing a solo recital, I'd managed to get sick the week before and was singing on a cold?), and so I felt I oversang to compensate. You name it, I thought it--and the Inner Critic was relentless and vicious, critiquing the thinness of tone, the poor phrasing, the word flubs, the pitch issues in the Poulenc piece and the fact that I'd let the accompanists' tempo change from rehearsal to recital throw me off in it....all through the concert. By the end, all I wanted was to crawl under a rock (preferably with a cocktail or two) and never call myself a 'professional' again.

My friends and colleagues, on the other hand, were generous and unanimous in their praise. And I couldn't believe a word of it.

I spent a lot of time the next day thinking about that. How could my experience differ so profoundly from what the audience had experienced? I didn't want to think my friends were merely blowing smoke up my posterior when they praised me. Why couldn't I believe them? What was wrong with ME that I couldn't accept or trust the praise, and that I was so damn hard on myself that I couldn't find a single thing to praise for myself? Had all the internal work I'd done on my self-esteem gone for naught, blown out the window by a few flubbed words and missed entrances? Where did that self-loathing come from?

It took a conversation with a friend a few days later to help me realize what I had missed. I confessed to her my feelings about the concert and my bewilderment at my reaction compared to others'. She said to me,

"It's because you were in hyper-critical musician mode--you were looking at it from the standpoint of 'I'm not operating at 100% vocally, and can't sing as well as I know I could, so it's not gonna be any good!'

"--but what you didn't hear was that, whatever you felt you my have lacked vocally, you more than made up for in terms of connecting with the spirituality of the poetry and communicating that beauty to your audience."

I was taken aback. I hadn't considered this at all, having been so intensely focused on the technical aspects of the performance. But she was right--and that was the missing piece of the puzzle, the reason my audience had responded so enthusiastically and generously....it wasn't about technical perfection, and never had been. I think that for a lot of us singers, we do focus so intensely on the technical that we forget to connect with the emotional depths of what we're singing about. We're taught to get the rhythms and the pitches, but not about HOW to get the rhythms and the pitches so that our audience understands them too. We forget that it's as much about the words as the music, and that it's more important to connect than to impress.

The whole reason we sing is not to show off our proficiency, but to communicate--to share uniquely human, and universal, emotions in a way no other art form can quite match.

I am so grateful for my friends....for their support but also for their insight and help in allowing me the grace to see and accept what really happened last Wednesday night, and that I always have more to learn about what it means to be a singer.

I was so busy rearranging twigs on the forest floor that I forgot to look up and see the light coming through the branches.

RM