This piece is something I've been wanting to do for a while. This skull is one I've had for a few years and had already painted with different designs three years ago. But I wasn't satisfied with it and knew that I could do better. So a couple months ago, I covered the skull with a layer of white gesso paint and planned out the beginning of my design. The design was completed in pen and ink over a period of a month or two. My motivation was to celebrate the life and death of this cow in a respectful way. The designs were inspired by Mexican and Indian fabric designs. The skull itself came from Seven Stars Farm, which is a farm that a number of friends of mine have interned at over the years. Seven Stars has a herd of dairy cows, which feed right next to the farmhouse that my friends have stayed in. The cows are so wonderful and beautiful, with their big lashy eyes and sweet demeanors. The farm is Biodynamic, which means a lot of things that I don't fully understand. But one of the practices they do is putting a cow head in their compost pile every year. After a few years of turning the compost and eventually using it as fertilizer, they recover these skulls. In 2011, we got 4 of the skulls, which we immediately processed by bleaching for a week and sunning for 2 months each (flipping the skull halfway through so that both sides get sun). I then scrubbed them down, and shook out any extra little bits of dirt (and stuff) out of the crevasses, prepping them to be utilized in whatever project we had coming. I sold this piece at an art fair last weekend. I am glad that someone will be able to fully enjoy it instead of it sitting on my wall for a couple more years until I don't like it any more and paint it over again. :)
A few days after this came out, I got an email from a friend asking me to explain the problem that this video is pointing to. They didn't get why these men hitting on this woman was a bad thing, or why Hollaback! is calling for this type of behavior to become illegal. So they asked me for my opinion. When I got the email, I blinked, stared at the wall, felt a lot of feelings, and had no words to explain what I was feeling. It's just a feeling you get! But after thinking it through, this is the response that I gave...
::start of email::
Why is this street harassment? Why, over the years, has saying "Have a nice night, miss" gone from being an accepted courtesy to an intimidating harassment that people are trying to call illegal? Why is this type of behavior called street harassment largely on the east and west coast, but not as much in the mid-west? What about our culture in this part of the world makes this unacceptable? I believe it is truly an anthropological question and I do not know the complete answer. But I do know something.
What I do know is that myself and other women who live in women-forward, anti-patriarchal, liberal settings feel a number of things when this behavior happens repeatedly... We feel creeped out, sexualized instead of respected, made to feel like we need to hide our beauty so we don't have it pointed out in public, we feel physically intimidated, we get yelled at for not responding in the way that the "harasser" wants us to respond, we are told that we need to smile and appreciate their unwelcome sleazy comments... For women who have been attacked, raped, grabbed on the street, molested on the subway or any other place, this type of behavior is very intimidating and you never know where it is going to lead. Some men are downright mean when you don't play into the script in their head. But in no way is this behavior respecting who the woman is, what her power is, her intelligence, and what her story is.
Some of the comments seem innocent enough, as the first scene in this video shows. "How are you doing today?" is the first comment she gets. There doesn't seem anything wrong with that, except for the comments that come directly after that, which narrate the intent of the first call. These comments make women feel really on edge, uncomfortable, being demanded of... it makes her feel like no matter how she is feeling, she needs to smile in order to please these men's moods. Why is it that someone telling me to smile pisses me off? Because it is ok for me not to be in the mood to smile because I have my own thoughts/feelings running through my head. These men don't ever tell other men on the street to smile. They don't call out anything to other men. There is a parody video to this original video, which exaggerates the respect, admiration, and privilege of men in our society. I'm not going to include it here because that can open a whole separate conversation, but I mention it because men showing respect looks different than how men cat call these women. Catcalls are not the kind of respect or attention that these women want, including myself.
Zooming out a bit, this behavior still falls into the story that women need to please men's wants whenever they are told to. And women are rebelling against that, and against the patriarchy that envelops that ideology. Men take it upon themselves to assume power in a relationship. "Smile." "You should be grateful when someone says you're pretty." All of this is demanding and points to their wants/desires, and has nothing to do with meeting women on an equal playing field, treating her like an equal human who has her own complex thoughts, talents, desires, fears, and lifestyles. And when I think of the progressiveness of the coastal cities, and the movement to even the playing fields between men and women in those cities, it makes sense that women living in progressive areas are finding this offensive, while people living in more conservative, patriarchal landscapes think it is the norm.
A lot of the comments in the video (and in real life) over sexualize the relationship between the man and the woman. And even when they seem innocent, that feeling of being sexualized is creepy. And by creepy, I mean it is unwanted pointed attention. If a man I liked romantically told me that my ass looked hot, I'd be way into that. But a stranger on the street saying that is completely unwelcome. I am so much more than my ass and I don't want the start of any interaction with a man to be that sexualized.
In response to you saying that they are simply hitting on her... This is not a safe way of hitting on someone. I don't know quite the words to describe it. Because of course it's nice to be called beautiful in some circumstances, but when it comes to walking around the streets, being gawked at, looked up and down by strangers, commented on... its embarrassing, unwanted, and it makes us want to hide.
The history of this kind of argument has been repeated in other settings. While I was talking with Patricia about this topic this morning, she pointed out that workplace sexual harassment used to be dismissed as well. Women were told to "get over it" when their butts were grabbed in the office or men made comments about their boobs, and were told that they should be grateful for the compliment. The conversation around workplace sexual harassment started with voices speaking up and ended with that behavior being called illegal. Will that happen now? The conversation has started. How do we want to respect one another? What kind of future do we want our daughters to live in? Each generation of feminists finds their own fight to fight, building off of the one before it, or knocking it down and rebuilding it another way. This video has gone viral because it resonates with so many and baffles so many others.
The woman shown in the video has already received rape and death threats from men all over since the posting of the video. This was unfortunately not unforeseen, as it is the case that when you speak up after you are hurt, the one who hurt you hates you more. This is a textbook pattern for all sexual harassment and is the case again today. Do we cower, too scared to have our voice heard because of the repercussions or do we speak up even when our voices shake?
....and that is my answer. I hope it helped at least a little.
::end of email::
I then hopped back on the internet and this video scrolled by me. It is a video of a man telling a women about how they should feel about being catcalled on the streets. This is called "Mansplaining" where I come from.
And if you are really interested in the video called "10 hours of walking in NYC as a white man," you can find it here:
A friend of mine puts together a yearly planner called Wretch. It is similar to the Slingshot planner, if you are familiar with that one. Anyway, she asked me to decorate some of the pages for next year's calendar and these are what I did on two of the pages..
"May I carry with me Freedom and Rootedness... And burst forth with Seeds of Life!"
"Fossil Fuels are made of Dinosaurs. Save the Dinosaurs!"
Last week in my dROARing class, we talked about animal behavior. We observed anatomically correct toy dinosaurs ::cough::cough::Christmas::cough::cough:: and tried to think about drawing them in different poses than the one they were sculpted in for the toy. This was harder than expected. The above was my best sketch of the day which isn't really a very exciting pose or angle. I'll have to work on this. Sometimes it's just hard to figure out how the limbs' muscles would bend into the body and how the different masses would squish and push one another. I'm excited to keep learning about how animal/dinosaur anatomy works. Maybe next semester I'll find an Animal Behavior class to take somewhere. That'd be a dream come true.
The illustration above will be colored soon but I'm still working on that...
Back in August, while on the lookout for a good fall art class I could take, I scrolled through Fleisher's adult art classes listing like I do at the beginning of most semesters. I grazed over the Watercolor Technique class and the Figure Sculpture class, waiting to see if something really grabbed my attention this year. I stopped scrolling when I reached "Dinosaur Drawing Class". As my eyebrows raised, I clicked on the link and read through the description. This was exactly what I wanted to spend my fall doing.
I emailed myself the link so that I could meditate on it for a few days before investing in the class, as it was no small investment. As I mulled it over, I realized that this class might be the first opportunity for me to learn from a professional how to structure an animal drawing from the bones on up. I feel like this could really benefit my accuracy in my drawings. In this dino drawing class, we would learn how to draw the bones first, then fit the muscles on, and finally lay the skin and decoration ontop of it all. Yes, please! I signed up for the class.
The class takes place in the Dinosaur Hall of the Academy of Natural Sciences here in Philly. I had been to Dino Hall once before, back in the late winter. It was inspirational then, but now I get to sit and sketch the beautiful specimens after-hours, without gaggles of schoolchildren around me. That is glorious.
My visit of awe and wonder last winter
Dino Hall's full Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton. You know. No big deal.
The first 15 min of class is warm-up. This little guy is a swimming dino.
This is a Torosaurus Latos female's skull from the Cretaceous Period
Last week, a journalist & photographer from the Philadelphia Inquirer came to class to gawk at us nerds. They went around and talked to some of the students and I thought I was safe from them. But then while they were across the room, I heard a series of shutter clicks and knew that I had been captured. Looking up, I watched as the photographer checked out the photo, started to chuckle, and leaned over to his co-worker to show him the picture. They both started quietly laughing and then pointing at me. This has not happened to me in about 20 years and I got a bit flush. They asked me some questions later and I guess they liked the most mundane thing I said, because they quoted it in the article they wrote a few days later...
I'm not sure this picture quite captures the adoration for this creature that is in my eyes...
This is what I drew that day. We started by drawing the skull, then erasing the skull and drawing the muscles, then erasing the muscles and drawing the scaly skin. Good thing I have thick paper.
This class is pumping me up this fall. I'm learning a lot and making a shit-ton of mistakes, but its a blast and I wouldn't spend my Monday nights any other way. Also, if you have a dinosaur documentary you like, let me know what it is. I watched all the ones on Netflix already.
After 15 years of staring at this unfinished dragon on the wall of my old bedroom in my parent's house, I have finally finished the piece. My folks decided to remodel the room this year. It was still covered in glow-in-the-dark star stickers and Eric Lindros posters from my teenage efforts to entertain myself, but at last my mom decided that it was time for the little room to become a real guest room. Down came the posters and up went new curtains and a layer of paint. She has always wanted me to finish this dragon, though, so a block of space was saved around it for me to "do something with". So I did something. I don't think I'll ever be completely satisfied with any piece that I complete, but this is what I did.
It's funny to think about now, but I have this very distinct memory from when I was a kid- maybe 7 or 8- riding in the back of my parent's Oldsmobile Silhouette minivan, gazing at the billboards that were sliding across my view.
I said to whoever was driving, "That's the kind of art I want to make when I grow up- billboards! Everyone sees it and you can make an influence on soooooo many people!"
I'm pretty sure that at that point, my parents started pointing out all the different types of art I could make if I wanted to. Glad for that.
But today, as I was hopping on the subway back home, I glanced across the tracks and saw my work on the little billboard there. This is the day I get to check off that childhood dream. Did it, little Megan. This one's for you.
