The first of my goddess paintings was created in response to an MFA course that I took in 2017 about women, gender, and identity in art. While looking at female representation over the centuries, I was especially taken with the Woman (aka “Venus”) of Willendorf, a 4.3-inch, 25,000-year-old female statuette found by an archeologist in the year 1908 in the village of Willendorf, Austria. I was awed by how her curved fat body were seen as so important to a cultural group that she was carried from Northern Italy, over hundreds of miles and through many generations until she was left in Austria. In this goddess figurine I saw my own body; her existence reinforced my understanding that beauty standards in American culture stem from the larger construct of white body supremacy, a false and destructive standard that I spent too many years trying to assimilate. I decided to create a self-portrait using the Woman of Willendorf to mark the shift from shame of my body to veneration, respect, and love for my body. That painting, “If I were Venus,” hangs in my home in a place where I see her daily.

Around 2018, I returned to drawing my Willendorf avatar shortly after I began another series of paintings (currently in progress) about my personal experience as a biracial woman living in American culture. Revisiting buried memories of experienced trauma stemming from white body supremacy, coupled with the uptick in violent hate toward and intolerance of BIPOC in America since the 2016 election was causing intense emotional flashbacks. So, I turned once again to this voluptuous goddess and began to “art play” with her. Making drawings and experimental monotypes of her in joyful frolicking, undulating, and relaxed poses was proving to be an effective cPTSD defuser; in 2019 I began to turn them into oil paintings. My little goddess paintings are self expressions of growing body joy, self love, and comfortableness with taking up space in this country without feeling like I have to explain or defend my existence in it.

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