SHADES OF EARTH MOTHER
As artist and art historian I have come to realize that the role of the artist originally was to give visual reality to deeply held cultural needs of the group. Few inquirers of our political predicament doubt the impact of our enslavement and its many aftermaths. The questions become why do we do harmful things to ourselves physically and do we really see our outward appearance as one of beauty and does this outward recognition of our physical being have inner, spiritual and social consequences? As African people, whose early cultural recognition acknowledged the role of the mother as giver and nourisher of life and thereby her connection to mother earth, African women were held in high esteem. It is obvious that such an adulation of the Black woman is not held by many in this society. We cannot expect such praise from others if positive attitudes and respect for our women are not displayed by us.
Because of my feeling for Black women, as an artist, I was affected when I realized thirty years ago that many of them did not deeply feel themselves to be beautiful. As Langston Hughes poetically described the Negro’s color as being from blue-berry black to milk white, the sixty piece exhibit consist of twenty African American women with this wide range of color to show the complexity of our women’s beauty. Thus, the reason why I originally name this collection of African American women images, The “Shades of EarthMother” was to show the diversity of the color hues of our people. As artist and cultural nationalist, I have always tried to write and create that which I feel is beneficial to African people. While African Americans have been bombarded with countless images of nude European women as goddesses and benevolent spirits, their insidiousness of importance has pierced our brains. These tentacles of white power insisting that “blonds have more fun” havewormed their way into our neurons and invaded the grey cells of our cortex unwittingly inducing us to make tentativeadjustment to white power as the image of African women were reduced as being unimportant, unworthy and ugly. One only has to view the many images of nude white women from Venus de Milo, Aphrodite of Cyrene, the Judgment of Paris paintings, the nudes of Rubens, Rembrandt on into the Impressionists nudes of Manet, Renior, Dagas and the countless nudes of modern painters such Paulson to see and understand the adulation of the European women in their natural state. There is no comparable collection of the image of African women to suggest that she is the most beautiful.
Over a ten year period twenty different Black women posed for me. From the drawings of these women in pencil, pen and ink, ball point pen, charcoal and crayon, I later completed the near life-size realistic oil paintings of them. Twenty smaller abstract versions of the realistic paintings complete the sixty piece exhibit. These beautiful African American women of different hues are nude to reveal their natural beauty unhampered by clothing and they are seated alone in an enclosed room to lessen any suggestion of sexual intentions. Instead my aim was to suggest self contemplation and introspection. While Europeans correlate nudity with sex or sexual intentions. Most of world’s people live in warm climates with the need of little or no clothing. They do not necessarily associate nudity with sex. As examples, in the savannahs and rain forests of Africa, it is not unusual to see bare breasted woman or unclothed women bathing them, they like the Black women I have known, outer attire is often their last concern following their attention to facial makeup and other preparations after the bath. Only the nude painted images will show the innocent beauty of African American and I created these images in hope of showing our people the beauty of themselves symbolized by their “EarthMothers.”
Aside from creating this unique exhibition showing the beauty of African American women to convey a socio-political homage to African women, there is also an artistic form-base reason for the twenty women is three different versions. Having taught drawing and painting and having taken art classes during the early sixties, I realized that many of the first converts to Abstract Expressionism were aspiring artist students who wanted a shortcut to fame without understanding the fundamentals of proportions, anatomy and foreshortening, etc. This is in part reason for the three versions of the same image. A way of showing how and abstraction can be derived from a naturalistic rendering or understanding the basic geometry of the human bodily structure. It is obvious that our African artist ancestors understood such a procedure.
I do not think that these beautiful women should be introduced to the world via a white controlled institution. However all of my attempts in the last fifteen years have failed to get Black community museums throughout the immediate geographical region, Atlanta, Nashville, Memphis, Cincinnati, Dayton, Philadelphia, etc. to exhibit these images. All attempts remained only as such because Ministers or other such persons with Victorian notions about nude/naked women on the Boards of Directors of the institutions voted against the exhibition.
My desireto see this collection exhibited remains hopeful but waning. However, a limited number of first edition prints are now available to interested and serious collectors. My reason for keeping the originals intact and together is that as symbol of the beauty and grace of women of African descent, they should not be divided and sold separately as their mothers, whom they represent, were sold doing the enslavement period.
(copying of these images and other art found on this website is prohibited by Law)
Bob Douglas