Like most of us who are lucky enough to live alone and choose what we hang on our walls, I am usually oblivious to what I put there, although the images on my bedroom walls are what I live with night and even part of the day. But yesterday I looked, really looked, at the two images that occupy these important spaces. Both of them are versions of the Virgin.
Yes, that virgin. The more traditional, painted 150 years ago on a piece of stretched hide (here in the west, it was often easier to find hide than canvas or even paper) shows the lady as a subdued character in a long-ago drama. In the new version, she is not subdued: she seems quite unaware of the fact that she is nearly naked except for a belt of skulls that mostly covers what my mother used to call ”Down There.”
Painted by the Los Angeles artist Paz Winshtein, the painting first caught my eye when it caused the priest at a nearby church to protest loudly what he felt was sacrilegious.
The tiny gallery that showed the work, hidden away on a side street, courageously refused to obey calls to take it down, and in a few days or weeks, the furor was forgotten and I bought the painting.
We’ve been trying for quite a while to expand our definition of the Sacred Feminine. When another nearly naked version was shown at one of our museums, the reaction was so loud and so negative the museum board decided to take it down. No such outcry has ever greeted my hide painting, and yet, if we try to believe in the image of the Virgin as proving the possibility of the human mixed with the divine—a hard concept for many of us—that painting, and in fact all paintings of the Virgin, should stir our disquiet.
But we still have a long way to go. Stitching together the stories of women seems only just to have begun, as exemplified in Katrina Parks and Sharon Niederman’s new film: The Story of Route Sixty-Six: The Untold Story of Women on the Mother Road. And we still admire the naked women in generations of paintings that manage to avoid raising the question of the Feminine Divine.
And yet she is always among us. When my granddaughter admired one of Judy Chicago’s flaming paintings until she was told it was a portrait of a vagina, her horror reinforced our difficulty with facing or discussing this issue.
Denatured we are in so many ways. But my shameless virgin shows that the question remains and probably will always remain, confusing and upsetting many:
Must the divine feminine be denatured?
[After I purchased Paz’ painting, I gave a short 5-minute talk at the gallery. That talk is available here on my website video and audio.]
Like you, I am enamored of images of the Virgin, & I have 2 images of the Virgin hanging on the walls of my bedroom in my home in Santa Fe. In my case, I saw them being painted in a small village in Peru when I was there to visit Machu Picchu. I have a large art collection, & those 2 pueces are my prized artworks.
Wikipedia has an entry for Hattie Ophelia Wyatt Caraway (February 1, 1878 – December 21, 1950).
She was an American politician who became the first woman elected to serve a full term as a United States Senator. Caraway represented Arkansas. She was the first woman to preside over the Senate. She won reelection to a full term in 1932. In the Wiki entry there is a picture of her taken in 1914. That picture shows her full length, but for my computer background I cropped out just her face. That face for me is a better take on imagery of perfection (purity, virginity, whatever) than da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.
I have three rules: 1-Love the mystery of oneness; 2-Love the grand illusion of twoness; 3-Love the centering wisdom of threeness.
Maybe the computer, where I spend so much of my little remaining time, is an OK place to hang my Hattie. Could that hanging serve all three rules?
upon entering my front door you’ll encounter a shrine i’ve “composed” to the virgin mary, featuring a twelve inch statue that sat on our girls’ chest of drawers all the years of our growing up. an electric votive in front of her (battery dead), she stands inside a repurposed drawer set on its end, a rosary draped over the drawer pull to hang down in front of her face. she’s eye-balling her son on the crucifix. poor poor mother.