Thank you for opening to an image perhaps uncomfortable. I hope that will ease as you read.
Great poets change us. The incomparable David Whyte writes, "The human body constitutes a live geography, as does the spirit and the identity that abides within it."
Dressed or not, we recognize others first by their landscape. The architecture of the face. The differences between male and female. The woman's back slopping to hips widened for childbirth.
Because I see women as Beauty's source and a shape opposite mine, I have always been drawn to her as artist as well as man. Her figure speaks Love's best creation.
Through art museums, academic study and a communion with dancers, I have photographed, filmed and sculpted the female form since 1975*. My work has received countless awards & been hung in galleries, museums and universities internationally.
Yet, it seems so inconsistent with my conventional career that many are aghast. We are less sophisticated than ancient Greeks. Portraying nudes remains dangerous.
Sadly, women without clothes have frequently been objectified. Sadly, most people are not educated to differentiate art from pornography.
Uncovering in a medical context, appropriately done when medicalized, remains difficult for women. Indeed, we must protect the sacred.
All of this confuses art appreciation. As Minton Sparks says, in our films Dreams of Drowning & After Drowning, "There's an implicit message that to gain power [women] have to swim in the vulnerability of their own nakedness"
Museum goers often turn their away from Beauty's best slopes, curves and shadows towards her offspring: mountains, flowers, oceans.
The larger point: When we hide from respectful presentations of the female form we blind ourselves to the sacred. The problem is not the geography of nudes but Society's failure to teach appreciation of the body as Soul's home.
Can an we absorb Whyte's wisdom? "To live out our genius is to live out the conversation between our particular inherited body and the body of the world."
Staying stuck is staying ignorant. "Throw the emptiness out of your arms/ to add to the spaces we breathe; maybe the birds/ will feel the expansion of air, in more intimate flight," Rilke writes.
Can we open our arms to broader life experiences? Can you, a weary caregiver accustomed to healing broken bodies, find greater beauty in the brilliant geography of your own and all others?
-Erie Chapman
*
https://nashvillearts.com/2018/07/the-other-side-of-erie-chapman/
"Minton's Back" Erie, 2018
