Gretchen Kelly, One minute pose 107.7

Before we do anything else we're going to look at some more of these paintings this artist made, these one-minute masterpieces

                                      One minute! The skill, the confidence! The joy of these bodies & colors, those sure lines 

Seven minutes of sketching/painting, we're looking at here, all told.

plus her whole career before those seven minutes but you get me

All our stutters and half-starts and second-guessing Wild-eyed editor assassins stationed with machetes at the birthplace of our impulses

"What if I—"YAAAAAAAAA <CHOP>

sigh    

BUT THESE BEAUTIFUL ONE-MINUTE NUDES ALSO INSPIRE ME TO THINK ABOUT BODIES & IMPULSES RELATED TO BODIES

 Here's a thought-provoking paragraph from a lecture by Mary Whitehouse called "The Tao of the Body"

from the book Bone, Breath & Gesture: Practices of Embodiment

I'm going to break up the text not to be arbitrary and artsy but so we can see it and get it. It's dense. We're going to uncork it and let it breathe.

"In our time there is a widespread repression of all physical emotion,

that is,

all bodily expression of  joy, grief, anger, affection, fear,

and an equally widespread  f a s c i n a t i o n with the b o d y ' s a p p e a r a n c e and f u n c t i o n .

Advertisements of cures for

nerves, constipation, colds, headaches, that run-down feeling; recommendations for slimming, trimming, building, developing; diets, gadgets, vitamins, how to sleep, how to wake up, how not to perspire, how to avoid bad breath

—the list is endless and body-centered.

All polarized by sex plastered interminably on billboards, in magazines, movies, newspapers,  in the form of the female body exposed and as unlikely in proportion as possible.

We are embarrassed and irritated

when confronted by any form of physical intensity in our personal lives.

  Joy in the voice and face is all right,  

grief in the voice and face is understandable,

anger in the voice and the face will pass,

but

an exuberant enveloping arm thrown around our shoulders,

the sight of a body rocking back and forth with grief, 

the sudden eruption of  a stamped foot  or

a book slammed violently down on a table,

all upset us. 

Could it be that the body is the unconscious,

 and that in repressing and, more important, disregarding

the spontaneous life

of the     sympathetic nervous system ,

we are enthroning the rational, the orderly, the manageable, and cutting ourselves off from all experience of the unconscious,

and therefore of the instincts?

Which then take their revenge in the form of an exaggerated, compulsive fascination with the body and all its works?

The less the body is experienced, the more it becomes an appearance;  the less reality it has the more it must be undressed or dressed up;

the less it is one's own known body,  the further it moves from anything to do with one's self."

and one more excerpt:   "Working with movement is an initiation into the world of the body as it actually is, what it can do easily, with difficulty, or not at all. But it is also, or can be, a serious discovery of what we are like—for we are like our movement."

OH MY GOD

"we are like our movement."

I imagine myself to be so free in my expression, free with my feelings, swell at making freedom for you with yours when the truth my body tells is that I'm stiff, repressed, hesitant and bumbly.

And the other things too, sure! kind of and I'm not putting myself down by seeing all of myself.

and I do, paradoxically, dance pretty damn well, IF THERE ARE NO STEPS AND IT'S JUST ME GOING NUTS

but there's a reason I'm obsessed with getting free.

I'm not like I think I am, you are not like you think you are,

we're much better + much worse + more interesting 

WELL, WE'RE NOT DEAD YET. WE HAVE THAT GOING FOR US. THERE'S STILL TIME TO UNLOCK OURSELVES.

homework* = dance to this leading with whatever bit of you is the deadest: 

  *-fuuuuck, we get homework in here? -yeah, you do, but how exactly am I going to check it       you know?    

Gretchen Kelly painted *this* nude in *more* than one minute   

gretchen kelly also made this lion