Remixing Rubens' 'Big Girls'

“She's beautiful,' he murmured.
'She's a metre across the hips, easily,' said Julia.
'That is her style of beauty,' said Winston.”

-      -    George Orwell, 1984

I never identified as a “big girl”. I knew “big girls”, and just didn’t see myself in them. However, by 13, I was already heavier and curvier than the majority of the girls in my grade. And these days, at a size 14-16, bra size 36DD, and a weight that I wouldn’t fib about but wouldn’t be particularly forthcoming with, either, I realize I am probably seen as one.

Is that my identifier? Because the things that I see as a key part of my identity are not so obvious. But how do I tell you about being the child of deaf, divorced parents, or about being happily raised in a non-traditional family, or about being 22 and never having had a guy tell me I was pretty? I started following a different train of thought, thinking instead about facets of my identity that are not important to me but are obvious. The clearest was this idea of being a “big girl.”

Rubens came quite immediately to mind. Peter Paul Rubens, a Baroque painter in the 16^th and 17^th centuries, was known for painting beautiful, full-figured women. In his milieu, they were considered “the apogee of beauty” (Alastair Sooke, BBC Culture). And where I have never identified as a “big girl”, I am quick to identify with Rubens’ women.

In our culture, “big girls” can be cute or even pretty, but they are not and cannot be beautiful. Perhaps that is the reason I balk at the label. In the shower, my thighs definitely touch. On the beach in a favorite swimsuit, my stomach has rolls. In bed, wearing as PJs that rom-com-esque oversized men's button-down - well, it fits. But I don’t feel just cute or pretty; I feel beautiful.

Ruben’s depiction of Venus, the goddess of love, beauty, sex, and desire, has rolls when she sits. She has cellulite. She has cankles! The goddess Diana barely has a jawline. Rubens’ own wife is painted with a slight double chin. But his women are beautiful.

In Jenkins’ “How Texts Become Real”, he speaks of placing materials in “the context of lived experience. [They] assume increased significance as they are fragmented and reworked.” I fragmented Rubens’ art and milieu, pulling just his women, then considered beautiful, into today’s fashion editorials. I wanted to prove that beauty then can be beauty now. Because perhaps if you see Venus on a modern beach, her stomach folded as she sits, and still think her beautiful, you might reconsider. Rubens’ women, “big girls”, plus-size, curvy, call us what you will - don’t need to be the “apogee of beauty” anymore. Just let us be beautiful.

Music Mosaic: Seeing Ratatat's "Seventeen Years"

One December night we raced down the freeway with the windows fogged and Ratatat’s Seventeen Years booming. I made up a melody with lousy lyrics, my friend began to spit babbling rhymes, and our third friend, choir-trained, added a golden harmony from the backseat. We slipped through traffic and the dark, improvising.

Annie Dillard wrote that “the newly sighted see the world as a dazzle of color-patches. They are pleased by the sensation of color, and learn quickly to name the colors, but the rest of seeing is tormentingly difficult.” Seventeen Years was only that mad rush through the dark, the lights of other cars blurred by the condensation we couldn’t clear, so to listen and somehow, simultaneously, see – “tormentingly difficult”, indeed.

I attempted to first capture the clearest feeling. A high synthesizer wails, tight but keen: it feels like infatuation. Infatuation is its own isolated universe, shining and confused and colorful, so I cut out a night sky, pasted it onto an explosion, and added color, diamonds, and a couple to cuddle in this tiny world.

Then I tried desperately to convey that night and the rich darkness, the cacophony of nonsense we strung into music. I depicted the rap stuttering along, out-of-focus; the melody rose, fuchsia; and the harmony rolled, golden and curved, over and through them. I grabbed magazines and listened to Seventeen Years, cutting out anything that looked like the song felt. Thus the next collage was atmospheric: hushed jewel tones and reflections, unfamiliar patterns and crowded cities. Seventeen Years is a rich, layered, contemplative urban jungle.

As I watched for colors, I felt the rhythm instead. I found a picture of African women marching and drawings of thick arrows. Glued together, their joint march pulsed on like the beat. But the beat slipped into darkness, and I suggested that creeping stillness with a photo of the Aurora Borealis laid behind snow-covered pines and inverted rocky slopes. I ripped the edges because the descent feels less polished than primeval.

I ended at the beginning: a few lines are spoken, a high synthesizer warbles into being, and suddenly – the drop. I made it literal: a streak of red falls and explodes into dust and smoke and tiny fragments. What else could I see? National Geographic, the magazine from which I cut, showcased dozens of photographers looking into the dark and seeing. In Whale Whisperers, Anuar Patjane looked into the sea and saw light, shadows, majesty. So I closed my eyes and sketched what I saw in the dark: a man with a crooked nose, leather-jacketed, a little smooth, with lots of swagger.

At last, in the dark, a thing I hadn’t yet seen. Just halfway through, the bass enters, grey and nearly unnoticed. Like the collage, he walks into and through the levels of the song like a stranger learning a city before he disappears entirely into its walls.

Ratatat: Seventeen Years