A Stuart Smalley kind of day...

Today I feel a bit like Stuart Smalley. I look in the mirror and try to egg myself on, but I just want to cry. I've just come from the massage therapist (sometimes referred to in my mind as the sadist). Now it isn't just the back that hurts, it's my whole body. I had a long day at work today and the last thing I want to do when I get home is more work. Grocery shopping is undone (I can't reach for stuff on the shelves anymore) so it's another takeout night. Hubby didn't think about dinner in the two hours he spent patiently waiting by the TV for me to get home. I keep asking him to take on more and more because I can't do it. And if I don't work in the studio I get cranky. Physical therapist is getting ready to start me on strengthening exercizes for my back. Ow and WooHoo! Maybe I'll be able to use a wet belt sander soon. In the meantime I just don't feel like doing anything. I have been home for three hours and I haven't looked in the kiln (in the next room) to see how last night's composition came out. Everything I need to do next involves using my back so I can't do anything without someone else's help. This is one of those days when I just don't know how I will ever have enough energy to work in the studio again. Ever. I know, I know. “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough and doggone it, people like me...”

I am definitely having a Stuart day. Think I'll just go to bed and try all over again tomorrow.

Odalisques

Just about every person I have spoken to who is familiar with the term "odalisque" thinks the same thing I do when asked what odalisque means. We think of familiar famous paintings with the title Odalisque, paintings by Ingres, Delacroix, Monet, and Renoir. We associate beautiful, voluptuous, mostly naked, reclining women with the term.

I began thinking about the term odalisque as I found myself using images of naked women in my glass work to express feelings and experiences. Imagine my surprise to discover that odalisques were Turkish slaves, chambermaids. If an odalisque was fortunate enough to be noticed by her master and bedded, even if just once, she advanced to the rank of concubine. If she bore a child from their union, then she became one of his wives. I imagine that the appeal of painting these women was the fantasy that it engendered for the male viewer - just to think of having a houseful of women who could serve as a sexual partner if and when he wanted....

If the odalisque is a slave then what purpose does the odalisque serve in my work? In the past year I have thought a lot about how we can easily become trapped in our minds, trapped by fantasies, by wishes, by imagined and real injustice, by lust, by anger, by depression and despair, by grief. We take on and embrace this enslavement to the emotions inside of ourselves when we can't see our way to solving the problem. For many, it is more comfortable to live inside this servitude than it is to battle and break our way out. So perhaps the odalisque is an appropriate symbol of the enslavements we enter into when we allow feeling and fantasies to consume us.