Throughout her twenties, Kelley Swain worked as an artists' model. 'The Naked Muse' is her elegant, fascinating memoir of this time, meditating on art, travel, and how we accept, inhabit, and understand our own bodies. She describes her first experience disrobing for a class, modelling for international artists over six years, an intensive month being painted in Bruges, and posing as saints for a Sicilian chapel frieze. Swain reveals how it really feels physically, intellectually, and emotionally - in the moment when "it's my matter that matters, not ... what I consider to be 'me'." Both a flirtation with submissiveness and a wielding of power, Swain examines the model's role in art's alchemy, and tells the forgotten stories of women whose faces still bewitch us from gallery walls.
Venturing outside the Decameron to the Latin works, and outside the usual textual and intertextual readings of Boccaccio to more broadly cultural and anthropological material, Boccaccio's Naked Muse offers fresh insights on this hugely significant literary figure.
Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) experimented with such a wide variety of genres that critics have tended to focus more on the differences among his works than on their underlying similarities. However, a more comprehensive examination of his corpus reveals that concealed beneath this striking diversity of subject and genre there is a coherent mythology, a virtual catalogue of innovative myths designed to more accurately reflect his cultural experience and better address the needs of his age. Exploring the most significant of these myths, /emBoccaccio's Naked Muse/em presents a writer who cast himself as the apostle of a new humanistic faith, one that would honour God by exalting his creation. Tobias Foster Gittes argues that Boccaccio did not simply reproduce Golden Age schemes in his works. Rather, he subtly altered and adapted them in order to produce a model of human beatitude more suited to his conviction that cultural achievement and human dignity are indissolubly linked. Gittes critiques common conceptions of Boccaccio's passivity, or his readiness to speak dismissively of his own work and to cast himself as a victim of vicious critics. Instead, Gittes shows that Boccaccio deliberately assumed this posture of passivity to align himself with a series of martyrs who, like him, had willingly suffered torments in the interest of cultural advancement. By venturing outside the Decameron to the Latin works, and outside the usual textual and intertextual readings of Boccaccio to more broadly cultural and anthropological material, Boccaccio's Naked Muse offers fresh insights on this hugely significant literary figure and his lifelong campaign to transform mythological traditions into a gift for all humanity.
The legacy of Adam and Eve brought about the connection between the idea of shame and embarrassment and nakedness, although it could also be associated with freedom of expression, defiance and triumph.
Naked for Tea, a finalist in the Able Muse Book Award, is a uniquely uplifting and inspirational collection. Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer's poems are at times humorously surreal, at times touchingly real, as they explore the ways in which our own brokenness can open us to new possibilities in a beautifully imperfect world. Naked for Teaproves that poems that are disarmingly witty on the surface can have surprising depths of wisdom. This is a collection not to be missed. PRAISE FOR NAKED FOR TEA Most anyone can make lemonade out of lemons. However, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer’s welcoming voice, receptive heart, artistic mastery, and empathic vision become an alchemy of being. Out of mudslides, misunderstandings, the exploits of Wild Rose, deep loss, and chocolate cake that sinks in the center, she makes courage, care, joy, and compassion. When “what’s the use” breaks down the back door, she is there, her great good soul encouraging us to sigh, laugh, renew our attention, and feel grateful for and delighted by any cake that sinks in the center. — Jack Ridl, author of Practicing to Walk Like a Heron and Saint Peter and the Goldfinch Heart-thawingly honest, deliriously sexy, and compassionate down to the fingertips. A book of kindness and bewilderment and delight from one of our best poets. — Teddy Macker, author of This World There is still rich ore in the Colorado San Juans. Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer is a treasure. In an era of seeming nonstop, subject-matterless, first person mirror dancing at the Temple of Narcissus incomprehension, it is a delight to find a poet who can tell a crackling story laced with gorgeous imagery and euphony that will appeal to the ancient seats of learning: the heart, belly, and brain. These are poems Sappho and Horace would love: they delight and instruct. They can be read and sung, and they will echo from the proverbial Colorado mountaintops through the archetypal red rock canyons of your mind. Prepare thyself to be smitten and to fall in love. — David Lee, Utah State Poet Laureate emeritus, author of Last Call and A Legacy of Shadows Reading Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer is to float upon a never-ending waterfall of wonder . . . Pay attention. The elegance of her simplicity will blind you to her mastery. Then, she will let you fall, head over heels, in Love. With everything. — Wayne Muller (from the foreword), author of Sabbath and Legacy of the Heart
By the late 1960s, the computer and television were linked to produce medical images that were as startling as Roentgen's original X-rays. Computerized tomography (CT) and magnetic reasonance imaging (MRI) made it possible to picture soft tissues invisible to ordinary X-rays. Ultrasound allowed expectant parents to see their unborn children. Positron emission tomography (PET) enabled neuroscientists to map the brain. In this lively history of medical imaging, the first to cover the full scope of the field from X-rays to MRI-assisted surgery, Bettyann Kevles explores the consequences of these developments for medicine and society. Through lucid prose, vivid anecdotes, and more than seventy striking illustrations, she shows how medical imaging has transformed the practice of medicine - from pediatrics to dentistry, neurosurgery to geriatrics, gynecology to oncology. Beyond medicine, Kevles describes how X-rays and the newer technologies have become part of the texture of modern life and culture. They helped undermine Victorian sexual sensibilities, gave courts new forensic tools, provided plots for novels and movies, and offered artists from Picasso to Warhol new ways to depict the human form.
A rich, penetrating memoir about the author's relationship with a flawed but influential figure—the painter Lucian Freud—and the satisfactions and struggles of a life lived through art. One of Britain's most important contemporary painters, Celia Paul has written a reflective, intimate memoir of her life as an artist. Self-Portrait tells the artist's story in her own words, drawn from early journal entries as well as memory, of her childhood in India and her days as a art student at London's Slade School of Fine Art; of her intense decades-long relationship with the older esteemed painter Lucian Freud and the birth of their son; of the challenges of motherhood, the unresolvable conflict between caring for a child and remaining commited to art; of the "invisible skeins between people," the profound familial connections Paul communicates through her paintings of her mother and sisters; and finally, of the mystical presence in her own solitary vision of the world around her. Self-Portrait is a powerful, liberating evocation of a life and of a life-long dedication to art.
“As erotic and powerful as the paintings that inspired it.”—Emma Donoghue, author of Room Paris, 1927. In the heady years before the crash, financiers drape their mistresses in Chanel, while expatriates flock to the avant-garde bookshop Shakespeare and Company. One day in July, a young American named Rafaela Fano gets into the car of a coolly dazzling stranger, the Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka. Struggling to halt a downward slide toward prostitution, Rafaela agrees to model for the artist, a dispossessed Saint Petersburg aristocrat with a murky past. The two become lovers, and Rafaela inspires Tamara's most iconic Jazz Age images, among them her most accomplished-and coveted-works of art. A season as the painter's muse teaches Rafaela some hard lessons: Tamara is a cocktail of raw hunger and glittering artifice. And all the while, their romantic idyll is threatened by history's darkening tide. Inspired by real events in de Lempicka's history, The Last Nude is a tour de force of historical imagination. Ellis Avery gives the reader a tantalizing window into a lost Paris, an age already vanishing as the inexorable forces of history close in on two tangled lives. Spellbinding and provocative, this is a novel about genius and craft, love and desire, regret and, most of all, hope that can transcend time and circumstance.
Misty Dawn is one of Jock Sturges' primary and most popular muses. He has photographed her for 25 of her 28 years. Taken as a whole this series of images presents a unique, fully realised portrait of a blossoming individual and explores the relationship between photographer and subject.
