Do you ever feel like you’re reliving a similar experience that you’ve had before, but this time with a new twist or added element or slight or not so slight variation? It happens to me fairly often. Perhaps it’s because I carry certain past experiences so powerfully into the present. Not by choice, but because they are a part of the history of my body. They contribute to the composition of color that I reflect. They are forever a piece of what spells me.
Also, these powerful experiences from my past are precious gems, so it could also be just a simple matter of turning repeatedly to a favored pose, letting it express in a new way, in an entirely new context. Like a painter who renders his subjects in roughly the same position over and over again. Like Degas and his women drying themselves after a bath. At first, I looked at them and thought, how boring. Why sketch and paint and sculpt the female anatomy in just this one way so prolifically when there are so many other possibilities for gorgeous shape and form? But then, as I studied them, I understood. He is fascinated with the sinew and nuance of the female back and its unquenchable capacity for poetic expression. He is attempting to exploit the expressive possibilities of the pose exhaustively.
I finally went to the Boston Museum of Fine Art yesterday. I don’t know what took me so long to get there. I’ve lived here for nearly seven months. I’m glad that I made it in time to see the Degas and the Nude exhibit. Because those images collided with my considered perception in such a way as to inspire new ideas and interpretations about the nature of the human condition. While working on a new and complex novel, this is exactly what I need.
What Degas does with the hair of his women subjects was one of the most intriguing aspects of his sketches and paintings (other than the backs). He sort of merges the hair with other objects like a chair or a blanket or even with shadow. It simultaneously disappears into and emerges out of these. It also usually cascades wildly from a bowed head, answering the lines and curves of her shoulders and back. Often, the hair would be the dark contrasted with the light on a gray scale charcoal sketch. Other times, he added color to the hair — skeins and tangles of pastel strokes of varying width and density. But the hair was never just one color or shade of gray. Sometimes, the hair was being combed upside down by the woman, and the hand and the implement would be half buried, giving the impression of a thick, difficult to tame mane. To suggest such a wide range of hues and meaning — to make one single pose a vehicle for such unlimited experimentation in style and method and impact — it was astonishing.
And that brings me back to this repetition of experience to which I liken it. As though there is a great artist choreographing all the little bodies moving in space to make them dance a prescribed rhythm with a firm reprise. Maybe it’s not the case that this repetition indicates a stuckness or a problem to pathologize and go about fixing or altering. Maybe, rather, this repeating an experience from the distant and not so distant past that feels familiar yet different happens because it’s being rendered on the semi-transparent tracing paper of a great artist. She traces an existing work then glues the thin paper down to a thicker support, strengthening the medium, enlarging the field. Then she sets about exploring its potential for expression. “Maybe I’ll develop this in color now,” she says. Or, “this time, I’ll make it monumental yet somehow fragile.”
She’ll go on creating a huge body of work — a collection of forceful studies expressing a range of emotion that is palpable and impossible to articulate. She’ll wipe and blend the color. Smudge and carve. She might add nocturnal lighting effects. She might gently wipe in lines of light from the inky darkness. The work that gets produced — the figure that emerges from her liquid, shadowy oils will not be accidental. Rather, it will be a meticulously and lovingly created work of art.
I can’t express how much comfort and relief I found hidden in this idea. Over the past decade or so, there are so many important ways that I have changed and evolved as a woman and as a human being. The changes have been deep and profound and internal, completely altering the external, because what looks out through these eyes is now so different. But there are patterns that persist, typically in relationships with others. And although these familiar experiences are filled with gifts and beauty and pain that grows me, I can’t help but interpret the echoes in them as warnings. Like I should be having an altogether new and unfamiliar experience each time. Otherwise, I’m stuck.
But then again. Perhaps no, I shouldn’t. I have two arms and two legs. I have a longish torso that tapers into slightly spreading hips. I have a whole body that, when drenched in light, casts roughly the same patterns of shadow always.
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