I have always been a strong believer in the story. I love literature. I love poetry. I love art. The reason is that all of these tell stories, and we are made of them. They are our souls. They are the fabric that makes us. What are we without them? I am obsessed with them - yours, mine, humanity's.
I took art history in university. I never quite got art before that, but once I took my first class, I was hooked. I considered becoming an art historian instead of a teacher. Had I not had a deep and fiery passion for teaching and books, that would've been my choice.
In my first art history class, I was introduced to La Grande Odalisque by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, painted in 1814. I couldn't pinpoint why, but I was arrested by this image. She was so vulnerable, complex, twisted, subverted and powerful. I fell in love with this piece. I remember returning over and over again to her, examining, interpreting, observing each and every detail. Why did I feel so drawn to this odd, twisted, idealized woman? This leads me to story #2, tidbits and realization from my first year of university,
Story #2 - Who the fuck am I?
I moved to another city for university. I couldn't wait to leave the city I grew up in. There was absolutely nothing in the place I wanted to associate with any longer, aside from my family. In the few short years before university, I'd lost my mother, my home, my younger sister, my closest friend, and my dignity. My mother succumbed to cancer. I was ejected from my home with a change of the locks at 16. My sister was too young to understand, and her father stopped my visits with her. My friend was going through her own things, and we were unable to reconcile differences. My dignity was shattered by rehashing my childhood abuse over and over again with detectives, courts and counselors.
I was ready to start again.
I didn't know who I was supposed to be. I was angry. I was hurt. I was broken. I was determined to build my life back up and make something of myself I could be proud of. I wanted to be someone my mother and sister could be proud of. I sunk myself into school with every fibre of my being. I took English. I took psychology. I took Art History. Capital A, capital H.
La Grande Odalisque was on the screen at the front of the lecture hall. My professor had a funny voice, but was full of wisdom and depth. His passion for art shone through, right to the back of the hall. She stared out from the screen at me. Her eyes betrayed her. The curve of her spine was impossible. She was captivating, and I couldn't tell you why.
I can now.
She was me. I was her. She was immortalized and twisted impossibly on canvas, forever altered by the eyes who saw her, created by the man whose brush told her what to be. But her eyes betrayed him, and were only herself. They looked directly at me, the viewer, with an intensity that made me both shrink and bloom at the same time. I couldn't look away from her because I saw all of myself in her eyes. I had stopped being ashamed of looking at the hard things in life. and I was searching for a way out of the twisted pain of my reality. She was twisted and on display, just like I had been in the many years I spent in court, soul bared before my abuser and my judge. She was also defiant, and I detected an extravagant soul with passion behind her peacock feathers and piercing gaze.
She was me. I was her.
Her story became mine. I had been made vulnerable by a man and his brush. I had been put on display, twisted impossibly, but not torn completely apart. I still held onto whatever piece of myself she held in her eyes, and I was staring back at the world challenging it to try me. You can look, but you can no longer touch. I was her, forever immortalized, but also defiantly me underneath. Eventually, I broke out of the canvas - out of the mold someone else had created for me. But, in that moment in my life, I was exactly La Grande Odalisque.
