I have been writing about the landscape of the body and its relationship to the body of the earth and the bodies of other creatures. About the sense of our own bodies as landscape, to be discovered, explored, savored.
These two paintings are by two of my most favorite painters. I met Laura Von Rosk many years ago during a residency at Yaddo. Her landscapes were the most sensuous I had ever seen. I bought one she had done in Minnesota. It had a perspective of gazing up the hilly thighs of a woman, across the fields of belly and breasts and into the sky beyond. I recently reconnected with her work at a show in Hudson at the Carrie Haddad Gallery.
Lempicka’s work invites us into the contours, the hills, valleys, the hidden caves of the body.
If you lie on the floor and roll very slowly from back to side to front, how do you feel the landscape of your own body? How effortless can you make that movement? Continue on, rolling to your side and then ending on your back.
Imagine this as a little meditation, a way of calling the earth of your body into awareness.
If you are a rider, can you feel a deepening harmony of your body and your horse’s body as you ride?