Words

Grief and love and entwine like roses, and never die. They remain with the old and encompass the new. This is what love is – what it was for us. Life does go on.

Louisa Young, author, from ‘You Left Early: A True Story Of Love And Alcohol’

Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive and well preserved body, but rather skid in sideways, chocolate in one hand, wine in the other, body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming "WOO HOO what a ride!"

~ Unknown Author ~

“Extinguish my eyes, I'll go on seeing you. Seal my ears, I'll go on hearing you. And without feet I can make my way to you, without a mouth I can swear your name.

Break off my arms, I'll take hold of you with my heart as with a hand. Stop my heart, and my brain will start to beat. And if you consume my brain with fire, I'll feel you burn in every drop of my blood.”

Rainer Maria Rilke

“The acceptance of woman as object of the desiring male gaze in the visual arts is so universal that for a woman to question or draw attention to this fact is to invite derision, to reveal herself as one who does not understand the sophisticated strategies of high culture and takes art "too literally," and is therefore unable to respond to aesthetic discourses. This is of course maintained within a world - a cultural and academic world - which is dominated by male power and, often unconscious, patriarchal attitudes.

In Utopia - that is to say, in a world in which the power structure was such that both men and women equally could be represented clothed or unclothed in a variety of poses and positions without any subconscious implications of dominance or submission - in a world of total and, so to speak, unconscious equality, the female nude would not be problematic. In our world, it is.”

From Linda Nochlin’s 1971 Essay: ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists ?

Reference Image: Linda Nochlin wittily illustrates and subverts standard female objectification - as seen in the 19th-century image of Buy My Apples - by photographing a male similarly objectified - seen in Buy My Bananas, 1972.