Flapper Cameo

"Love of beauty is Taste. The creation of beauty is Art."
Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye."
Miss Piggy

"Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, But beautiful old people are works of art."
Eleanor Roosevelt

I painted this portrait of a Flapper from a photo I found online. I love looking at old photos and works of art. I find it interesting that people's bodies and faces change with every generation and so do beauty standards. Although my generation is composed of many different types of women, it praises anorexic-looking women with silicone curves. My mother's generation liked women that were tall and long-legged. My grandmother's was fond of shorter and full-bosomed madames. Renaissance men admired women that were full-figured with delicate facial features. Medieval women were big-nosed and pretty ugly by the modern standards and yet the men of their time found them beautiful. It makes me wonder how many women who were not considered beautiful in their own time would've been called gorgeous in ours and vise versa.

One of my favorite fairytales is a story by Alexander Kuprin called "The Blue Star". It's a story about a princess who was born so ugly that her father ordered for all the mirrors in his kingdom to be smashed, so that she can never find out how ugly she is. When the princess grows up she meets a man (who turns out to be a prince from another kingdom) who is also incredibly ugly. She falls in love with him and marries him. The king is pleased that they found each other, because both of them are so unattractive. The newlyweds travel to the prince's kingdom, where the princess finds out that she is considered to be incredibly beautiful by her husband's countrymen and people like her own countrymen are the ones revered as ugly by their standards. The moral of the story is definitely something to think about...