I am writing a love letter.
Not with my words, but with pink paints and lace and sweet sparkles. A Valentine’s Day card to women who get less love than they deserve. I find pictures that capture me in their beauty. The curves of a woman, all women, inspire me. I abstract their forms, using the curve of an elbow or of a hip to create my background. Every piece of my art is a woman, and every piece is for women.
I mainly work with collage, embroidery, and paints, inspired by the crafting I saw my mother do when I was a child. I remember long nights of her sewing on the couch, and I feel the pull of her needle as I outline my shapes. I cut silhouettes of faces and bodies that are distinctly female but still obscured enough to be any woman.
My art is pink and red and saturated with glitter as a warning to the wandering eyes of predatory men that this is not for them. As a woman, I have been victim to the male gaze that permeates everything within our society, and I do not intend to subject the women in my art to that same objectification. Instead, my art is to praise women without regard to their value to men.
My art is a love letter to the women I see on the street but never in a magazine. The beautiful women who are rounded or short or crooked nosed. My art is for the real women of the world, not the naked abstractions painted by and for men. All women deserve to be celebrated in art, so I hope, for once, you can recognize yourself on the wall.
Not with my words, but with pink paints and lace and sweet sparkles. A Valentine’s Day card to women who get less love than they deserve. I find pictures that capture me in their beauty. The curves of a woman, all women, inspire me. I abstract their forms, using the curve of an elbow or of a hip to create my background. Every piece of my art is a woman, and every piece is for women.
I mainly work with collage, embroidery, and paints, inspired by the crafting I saw my mother do when I was a child. I remember long nights of her sewing on the couch, and I feel the pull of her needle as I outline my shapes. I cut silhouettes of faces and bodies that are distinctly female but still obscured enough to be any woman.
My art is pink and red and saturated with glitter as a warning to the wandering eyes of predatory men that this is not for them. As a woman, I have been victim to the male gaze that permeates everything within our society, and I do not intend to subject the women in my art to that same objectification. Instead, my art is to praise women without regard to their value to men.
My art is a love letter to the women I see on the street but never in a magazine. The beautiful women who are rounded or short or crooked nosed. My art is for the real women of the world, not the naked abstractions painted by and for men. All women deserve to be celebrated in art, so I hope, for once, you can recognize yourself on the wall.
