scatter joy!

christina’s world {through rose-colored glasses}

call me crazy, but doesn’t this look like a photographic version of  Christina’s World?

ok, so maybe the photo is missing the barren, sun-scorched field and the lonely barn in the back.  and maybe Christina is sprightly & lithe in the photo, instead of crippled & weary, as she’s supposed to be in the painting.  still, there’s something about the photo that makes me feel like this is Christina, as I would have wanted her to be.

my sophomore year in college, I ended up in a room that had this painted directly on the wall.  it had the same proportions as the original, a 30x50 painting right in the middle of a stark white wall.  the guy who lived there before me had painted it himself, and in a kafka-brod-esque moment (ok, not really, but sort of), my roommates & I convinced him to leave it up instead of painting it back to white, as the dorm rules required.

so the story goes that Christina’s World is a depiction of Christina Olson, a woman who lived near Wyeth’s summer home & whose lower body was crippled by polio.  Wyeth looked out his window one day, saw Christina crawling across a field, and poof, inspiration!  or so the story goes…

I actually hadn’t read the painting like that.  before hearing about the real Christina, I thought Christina was a young, healthy woman who had just stopped in the middle of a field to take a rest & soak in the expansive space around her.  I imagined her running & skipping & frolicking through the fields just moments before stopping to rest.  to me, the position of her hands & head were about the eagerness with which she was taking in the scene around her.  and the wisps of hair blowing in the wind looked like the rumpled hair of someone who had been prancing around all day, not of someone who was toiling to pull her paralyzed lower half just a few feet forward.  sure, if you look for it, you can see the lifelessness in her legs, the desperation in the arch of her back & that forward lean, the frustration of a person trying to will herself to where she wants to be.  but the flowing hair…no matter how many times I get it in my head that this is a portrait of struggle & strength & courage in the face of adversity, no matter how many times I try to see it that way, those wisps of hair make me feel like she’s a country girl, just taking a rest as she saunters her way home through the fields.

{photo via: holga, painting at MoMA}

{p.s. I want to play with a holga camera!}