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October 14, 2004
The Subconscious Marketer
I was completely in love with the artist across the hall. She was amazingly, enchantingly, uncompromisingly beautiful, with a long, slender neck, gently sloping shoulders, wide, rounded hips, and incredible dancer's legs.
She kept her red hair in raggedy braids, into which she inserted wires so she could position them into funky shapes radiating from her head.
"Like Pippi Longstocking" she said, when I asked her about her unusual, door-frame-threatening hairstyle.
I loved everything about her, from her looks to her voice to her ability to easily perform any task, no matter how complex, from changing a tire to pressing molten sand into glass sculpture to improvising recipes for vegetable-based stews. I'd come home from a long day of school and study and work and she'd be waiting for me at my door, "my snake just laid an egg and I'm wondering if you'd keep an eye on it while I finish the peking duck" or "would you stand here for a couple of hours for me? I'm learning sandstone carving and I want to make sure the curve on this shoulder is perfect."
She was infinitely capable, amazing to watch, but her paintings belied her confident uber-competence.
In her painting assignments, she was a little girl. a cyclops. a crinkly crone. Her ungainly, ugly, pear-shaped, self portraits were difficult to reconcile with her perfect porcelain midwestern beauty - but self-portraits they were, and she painted each one to highlight a different aspect of her imperfect personality.
I asked her, one afternoon, after a showing titled, simply, "portraits", if her paintings were supposed to portray an inner struggle that I had somehow neglectfully failed to notice.
I wondered if she really saw that face in the mirror, with the enormous nose and the scraggly hair. If her self-portrait as a drooling one-eyed monster holding an upside-down textbook was supposed to be telling me something.
and I'm not sure I believed her when she said "no, I'm just exploring the boundaries of portraiture..."
I know that this statement, oh-so-long-ago, was meant to begin a conversation about the ol' art-review chestnut: "which is more valid: artist intent, or viewer's reaction?" and I remember participating wholeheartedly, nodding at all the right moments, agreeing enough to appear friendly, but arguing just a little bit in order to keep the conversation going for the rest of the evening...
I know, you're wondering "why are you telling me this story, heather?"
And I'll reply: "Well, it's been a while since I've had that feeling of overwhelming interest. . . the feeling that I want to know every little thing about a person - and then I want to ask about every little thing again and again..and I think it may be happening again.
we're going on a second date tonight, in fact.
This young man has a totally interesting and unusual name, an even more interesting background, and quite a contrastingly boring (but lucrative!) career.
he's so interesting, in fact, that I had to stop to think "is it just because he's new? or because I'm feeling insecure?
but I'm thinking, no, he just gets me in just the same way my arty-mc-arty-pants friend did...with amazing skills and contrasts...and I can't wait to see what happens next.
I promise, I'll tell you if he asks me to help him with his sandstone carvings...
Posted by Heather at October 14, 2004 08:43 AM
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