Today I am off to the Rubens exhibition at the Royal Academy. The website describes him as being “best known for his fleshy nude women.” So I thought I’d have a go at mocking up one of his paintings for this week’s Sinful Sunday! I settled on Andromeda.
Quite by chance, on the day that we celebrate motherhood in the UK, the only material I could find that was diaphanous enough to be a useful prop was my Granny’s wedding veil. I am not sure what she’d make of this! I am pretty sure she wouldn’t approve of the fleshiness of the model – she was forever telling me to wear a girdle (really!) and would promise I could have her beautiful old coats, but only once I lost some weight. But I do think she’d smile at this project.
I have my suspicions that if she’d been born a few decades later, her life would have been a little more like mine – childfree and full of travel. The youngest of seven daughters and mother to three sons, she didn’t try very hard to hide the fact she liked animals more than humans. With a magnifying glass she used to pore over a tiny map of the world, trying to find where I was working that month. “You’ll never settle down, will you?” she asked me once. It sounded more like an expression of concern than a question. “Don’t”, she said next, “I don’t think you’d like it very much.”
exposing40 