Art and Rape ...

When I started My Mood Kit some almost six months ago, I had a rather vague idea of using the powerful emotions of art to facilitate dealing with emotional challenges from issues like corporate stress burn-out, living in high-density cities, crowded daily transport and maybe even fear of injury from drug related crime.

I then started www.balconyherbgardening.com because I felt that the process of communicating with art, using that focus to identify specific mainly negative emotional issues and then delving into them using the introspection of yoga nidra meditation and physical therapy of chi kung would be too complex for most people.

I felt that the therapeutic benefits of interacting with growing, living things like plants, herbs would more easily generate a state of calm introspection as it does with me.

So imagine my utter surprise and almost shock to read about Artemisia Gentileschi and her rape at the age of 18 by her art tutor Agostino Tassi some 400 years ago in the even then sophisticated city of Rome.

She became the most brilliant female artist of her time, but what seemed to have driven her to creating the masterpiece “Judith Slaying Holofernes” was the rape by Tassi while he was her mentor and tutor, betraying her and her father’s trust and even being fobbed off by the Pope at the time and allowing Tassi to be acquitted.

“Gentileschi's biographer Mary Garrard famously proposed an autobiographical reading of the painting, stating that it functions as "a cathartic expression of the artist's private, and perhaps repressed, rage.”

Mary Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi (1989), qtd. in Phillippy, Patricia Berrahou (2006). Painting women: cosmetics, canvases, and early modern culture

Another of her paintings, “Susanna and the Elders”, “uses a biblical story to dramatise what it was to be a woman in the 17th century. Two old men are spying on a young woman bathing, but Gentileschi heightens the creepiness by having the men come right up and openly stare, while other artists tend to show them hiding at a distance. Why does she show the voyeurs as totally unembarrassed, making no attempt to conceal their lust and intruding on Susannah’s space?”

How close is this to the stalking of Hillary Clinton by Donald Trump in their second Presidential debate? So it would seem that attitudes have not changed much in the last 400 years, even though Western civilisation has gone through major cultural, social and political changes.

What can we do about it? Firstly read the Guardian article here: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/oct/05/artemisia-gentileshi-painter-beyond-caravaggio and then perhaps start investigating the paintings on the My Images page and see what arises. Are there sensitive issues? Delve into them with and explore the images which surface from your sub-conscious by using My Yoga Nidra Meditation

You can read more about her and her art here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemisia_Gentileschi#

Once again, enjoy the journey!