The Baltimore Museum of Art / Discuss

bonnieschupp    says:

(Although I didn't upload my green pepper photo, I want to share how Edward Weston has influenced me.)

Mother always told me to eat my veggies. They would help me grow she said. What she didn't tell me was that vegetables are good for other things too. I would learn this later from a man who showed me the intimate essence of a vegetable and its sensual pleasures.

He presented a green pepper, naked, light entwining the roundness of its body. With gentle persuasion, my eyes learned to savor a journey over a smooth green landscape and to discover subtle nuances beyond the surface. Sensuous rhythms pulsed in me as I imagined fingers gliding and encircling the rise and fall of the skin. I discovered how light licked undulating curves and shadows slid silently into folds. Enticing beauty beckoned me to slip my tongue into its greenness and smell its promise of hidden seeded treasures.

With a black and white photograph of a green pepper, Edward Weston stroked my senses and led me to feast on possibilities of experience.

If an ordinary green pepper can offer itself as sumptuous, both food and perceived nude figure, what might other ordinary things speak? After such a visual culinary delight, I began to travel beyond looking and to relish seeing as a sensual experience. Ever since I saw Weston's erotic green pepper photograph, I have never taken any vegetable for granted and I have never looked at a green pepper in the same way. This union of vision and desire gave birth to a new way of seeing and experiencing life in deeper dimensions.

Veggies did help me grow. Mother ate green peppers.

I think of them as love affairs.
Originally posted at 8:11AM, 18 April 2008 PDT ( permalink )
bonnieschupp edited this topic 3 months ago.