Plain Beauty

The clinical supervisor in one of the mental health teams where I work mentioned today in the staff room during lunch that she thinks that all plastic and cosmetic surgery ought to be banned.  I largely agree with her, and both of us being of a certain age you could say that we look upon life with rather dry eyes.  We had begun the conversation talking about how some Asian women go in for plastic surgery to get their eyes done, where the characteristic fold is surgically removed giving the eyes a rounder more Caucasian appearance.  Then we moved on to a couple in China where the wife, before meeting her new husband, had undergone extensive cosmetic surgery.  When his beauty queen wife was delivered of two very ugly children and wifey fessed up about the surgery hubby sued her over the goblin offspring she had born him.  Then the conversation turned to how unrealistically perfect and beautiful celebrities, primarily female, look thanks to regular nips and tucks as well as the blessing of Photoshop and digital editing and what cruel, unattainable and impossible role models they become for women and girls.  There is an almost criminal sense of irresponsibility here that encourages women to hate their bodies and their looks and go to sometimes ridiculous extremes to look "beau-ti-fool." 
I'm thinking of my own mother whom, shortly after she crossed the fifty threshold began to consider getting a face lift.

My mother, Joyce Greenlaw, 1930-1991,

not for sale 

 

 

I painted this portrait of my mother sixteen years following her untimely death from cancer.  She would have about fifty-seven as depicted in this painting, or my age now.  Now what do you see? An aging woman?  Well yes, she is moving towards sixty here.  An aging woman with dyed hair and make-up?  Good one, Sherlock.  She is showing in this portrait the characteristic signs of aging that all women and men go through with the characteristic lines, wrinkles and sagging skin.  In my opinion she is also an attractive woman, good-looking, not just for her age, but simply good-looking.  She doesn't need to look young and I would dare to say that part of her beauty is in the art of aging that shows so unapologetically through the make-up.Here is my portrait of Screen Legend Marlene Dietrich, or "there but for the grace of high cheekbones go I".  In order to do this painting I sourced and work shopped a  number of photos, primarily a candid shot taken of her in 1963 during the funeral of her lover Edith Piaf, two months before her sixty-second birthday.  Whether or not Dietrich had cosmetic surgery (and surely she must have) what I have tried to capture in my interpretation of her is the real, the essential person, an old woman stricken with grief, peering through the mask of glamour.

Here is my interpretation of British Author and famed member and founder of the Bloomsbury Group, Virginia Woolf Without a trace of glamour or fakery here is an authentically beautiful woman. 

Here is British author and Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing at age seventy:

 

And here is Doris Lessing at thirty-six: The young Doris Lessing is merely pretty.  The old Doris Lessing is beautiful.

 

I find it interesting how disingenuous some of these aging tootsies can be.  Sophia Loren, for example who insists that she looks so spectacularly great at almost eighty because she eats pasta and drinks red wine every day.  Any practicing cosmetic surgeon can itemize like a grocery list the work she has had done on her face, her neck, her breasts, to the tune of around maybe fifty grand?  Likewise Jane Fonda, and all those screen goddesses and aging torch singers who continue looking inaccessibly beautiful into their eighties but only because they have the bank accounts and the vanity to get their aging hienies to the plastic surgeon every year.

 

In the meantime, for everyone, I am going to propose what my supervisor has already suggested: that we learn to celebrate the ordinary.  The vast majority of us look very ordinary.  But why stop there?  Perhaps there is something particularly beautiful in looking ordinary?  Maybe without disguising or erasing the alleged flaws that identify us as the awesome individuals that we are we should celebrate them? 

 

As some of you know, besides portraits, I paint mainly tropical and very colourful birds.  I have never been interested in painting the plain little brown jobs.  But when you look at a sparrow, or a robin or a hawk or owl you will find in the subdued earth tones of their plumage such an incredible if subtle range of shades and tones of brown, umber, ochre, sienna and black white and grey with a near dizzying range of tonality.  I may one day paint these little brown jobs.  but the brilliant bright colours of the rainbow still cry, scream and sing in my artist ears a little bit louder.