I like art that depicts women not posing seductively or gracefully but simply existing as human beings.
Works:
1. Ampio orizzonte by Ettore Tito, 1910 2. Mariana (Millais) by John Everett Millais, 1851 3. Bathing Girls by Paul Gustave Fischer, 1860-1934 4 If a woman reads a book in the forest but no one is there to see it… by Jenna Gribon, 2020 5. The Reader Wreathed with Flowers / Virgil’s Muse by Camille Corot, 1845 6. In the Garden by Helena Janecic 7. A girl with her bike looking over the water by Alexander Akopov 8. Girl with a Straw Hat by Francine Van Hove 9. After the Ball by Ramon Casas, 1895 10. Untitled by Francine Van Hove
when i was younger i worked on a farm for 3 years. during late july and august we would have unfettered access to the strawberry plots. they were all warm and ripe and fresh. i think i ate a pound of dirt back then. i think i picked enough seeds out of my teeth to build a temple. the summer hours are long; i’d come home with the bruising stain of juice running in a seam along my cheeks and fingers and jaw.
why didn’t you protect your precious things from other people? you knew this could happen.
i can’t eat strawberries from the store anymore, they don’t taste right. something about the florescent lights and the chill of them and the way they are absent from the vine. they feel bleached and bland, a wasted party dress. i watch other people eat strawberries and miss enjoying them. none of the store-bought strawberries will have mold or bugs, okay. they will be big and bright red and perfectly shaped. but they are not the ugly and real strawberries of my summer, awarded by the soil and the hot sun up ahead and hours spent crouched, plucking.
i didn’t mean to let it get ruined. i wish it hadn’t been. i miss having it. but i came back to it afterward and it just wasn’t the same as it had been. i know love is never wasted. but it feels like - love did this. it’s not that i never loved it, you know? it’s that i did.
when kafka said “all the love in the world is useless when there is total lack of understanding” and when richard siken said “if you love me, you don’t love me in a way I understand.”
When orwell said: “Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
