[ Post a Response | The Sublime Desire of Cigarette Smoking ]
Posted by vesperae
on March 28, 2009, 2:41 am, in reply to "Re: "Transformation of Venus" / This Week's Header Image"
This week's forum header image is based on:
_-_The_Birth_of_Venus_(1879).jpg)
"The Birth of Venus" 1879, by
William-Adolphe Bouguereau
30 November 1825 - 19 August 1905
W. A. Bouguereau's many paintings are widely regarded by art critics as being significant for his remarkable skill in realistically rendering human flesh (which is very difficult, if you've never attempted it), but most tend to view his body of work as being not terribly significant in the greater arc of human expression.
But I've always loved his paintings, because when I look through his work, I am struck by an intense psychological presence that seems to radiate from virtually all of his subjects, and most easily reach out from the surfaces of his canvases and draw me into their worlds. (Click on his portrait for a small sampling of his work.)
He also clearly had a great love of femininity, and the tenderness with which he poses and presents the women and girls in his paintings gives me a great sense of warmth and satisfaction in my own femininity. It has always been very centering and calming for me to spend time with them.
I actually felt more than a little Dirty corrupting one of his paintings in the way that I did, but that feeling was entirely consistent with the intent of the image. In fact, the "wrongness" of doing it felt an awful lot like the "wrongness" of starting to smoke.
Greek and Roman Gods and Goddesses are really nothing more than iconic representations of different aspects of our psyches, and in this image we have one of my favorite variations on the classic mythological birth of Venus, which in Western thought is the Icon of the beginning of human sexuality and romantic love.
So for those of us who eroticize the act of smoking, the moment of the beginning of this romance might be symbolized in a slight variation of this collective Icon, since there is no more profoundly transformative moment for our Unusual Desires than when we first begin smoking, or when we imagine or remember the moment that an object of our desires first began smoking, or when we first saw an object of our desires smoking.
For us, the Birth of Venus set our underlying sexualities in motion, but the Transformation of Venus changed it into something much more complex...
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