Skip to main content

transparent beauty

I went to see Ana Maria Hernando at her studio in Boulder. My mother-in-love took me along and I am so grateful that I relented, lifted my dragging heels and went. Ana Maria is working on an installation for the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art, essentially a mountain of colorful Peruvian petticoats. What struck me the most was the way that she talked about her work. She talked about flowers, doilies and woman's work... how the beauty of a woman's effort becomes a transparent backdrop to life.
Women wash dishes, embroider towels, clean sheets, scrub floors, quilt blankets, mend clothes, care for children and fathers and husbands...
while the love and effort that goes into each endeavor is transparent, fleeting...
like a flower briefly blooming and fading away...
like a brilliantly embroidered cloth quickly stained and torn by use...
like lace doilies, or hankies or hand crocheted petticoats.
Woman's work, transparently beautiful, so often unseen.

Our conversation made me think...it made me feel, to reach down into the quiet abyss of longing and it made me see. I looked into the mirror at the fleeting face staring back, aging, transparently beautiful, given briefly to the world and stained by time, by sorrow, by use. I long to hear her voice, my woman voice, uniquely mine with something to say. I long to acknowledge her beauty before her bloom fades and is gone. And yet I realize that it is the backdrop, providing an unseen context to the composition of a life.

Please go see her work at the MCA in February or click here to see it online.

Comments

C.S. Perry said…
There's a tremendously good short-story called "Everyday Use" by Alice Walker that gives us the other side of this coin and presents a beauty all it's own.
Beauty may be fleeting but perhaps its ephemeral nature is the very thing that makes it beautiful in the first place.
But then...I'm only a man and , therefore, I probably have no sense of what Beauty really is.
(Unless, of course, we want to put any stock in what that bastard Keats had to say about it.)
January 11, 2009 at 2:59 PM
Angelina Lloyd said…
Yes, I agree, perhaps the fleeting, ephemeral nature of a thing, is an essential component of beauty...the backdrop...the transparency...and yet our culture acknowledges overt beauty...youth, "perfection", wealth and it's accoutrements. Transparent beauty is often overlooked, blooming before blind eyes. Yet, the beauty of a well worn face, a woven woolen shawl, a carefully prepared meal, surpasses the beauty of a botox-ed, mass produced, foil wrapped world.
January 11, 2009 at 3:35 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

FORGET ABOUT ‘HEALING’

Some days,  you just have to forget  about ‘healing’. You have to stop trying to feel better, trying to overcome your emotional wounds, or trying to be anywhere other than where you are. You have to embrace the day as it is. And you have to give yourself the most sacred permission of all: To shatter.  To break.  To be an ugly mess. To lean into a place of utter humility and powerlessness in yourself. To cry out to the heavens, “I can’t do this!” To admit utter defeat  in the loss of the life  you had imagined. To crumble to the ground, lonely and hopeless and profoundly ruined. To want to die, even. And there, in the darkest places, in the blackness of the underworld, you may begin to rediscover... life.  And learn to love the beginnings. A sacred reboot: A single breath.  The way the sun warms your face. The sound of a tiny bird singing in the tree over there. The raw simplicity of a single moment of human existence. Hell has been transmuted, thr...
Post a Comment
Read more

a story recently shared by a friend

 Once upon a time, there was an island where all the feelings lived: Happiness, Sadness, Knowledge, and all of the others, including Love. One day it was announced to the feelings that island would sink, so all constructed boats and left. Except for Love. Love was the only one who stayed. Love wanted to hold out until the last possible moment. When the island had almost sunk, Love decided to ask for help. Richness was passing by Love in a grand boat. Love said, "Richness, can you take me with you?" Richness answered, "No, I can't. There is a lot of gold and silver in my boat. There is no place here for you." Love decided to ask Vanity who was also passing by in a beautiful vessel. "Vanity, please help me!" "I can't help you, Love. You are all wet and might damage my boat," Vanity answered. Sadness was close by so Love asked, "Sadness, let me go with you." "Oh . . . Love, I am so sad that I need to be by myself...
7 comments
Read more

He is no longer here

Another day has begun.  I have lit my candles and incense.  Sat in silence. Worked up a sweat at the gym.  Eaten breakfast.  Straightened house.  Answered mail and dropped my man off at the airport. It is eight in the morning and the world stirs with wakefulness.  The sun climbs in the sky.  The birds sing.  The squirrels chip and chur in tree branches.  A dog barks.  And I look with dull eyes at the long day ahead, contemplating a single phrase, "My father is dead." What strange words. My father is dead. The man has been leaving for as long as I can remember and yet his death robs the wind from my lungs.  My chest throbs and throat tightens.  He isn't coming back. My mom and dad had slipped out of one another's lives before I'd barely begun mine.  Two weekends a month my brothers and I stood on a saggy porch, bags packed, eager for our hero to arrive in his old blue Ford to pick us up.  We vibrated with hope...
5 comments
Read more