The Nakedness of Woman, a celebration of timeless beauty
It’s a beautiful vision – the female figure. For as long as man has created he has immortalized the female figure into his art. Countless powerful and beautiful artworks have been created, along with stories told. More songs than anyone can count been written and poems are scattered across eternity. Beautiful woman have been elevated to pedestal status and celebrated for as long as time existed.
In celebration I’ve assembled a selection of great quotes about beauty and the nakedness of women, their role as Muse and their eternal contribution to the arts. I’ve sprinkled a few of my paintings to express my appreciation for the muse in the best way I know how.
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I have read that the ancients, when they had produced a sound, used to modulate it, heightening and lowering its pitch without departing from the rules of harmony.
So must the artist do in working at the nude.
Antonio Canova
BEAUJOLAIS – painting on metal, 48 x 36″ – A.D. Cook
I have unbounded admiration for the nude. I worship it like a god.
Auguste Rodin
Man’s naked form belongs to no particular moment in history; it is eternal, and can be looked upon with joy by the people of all ages.
Auguste Rodin
The body always expresses the spirit whose envelope it is.
And for him who can see, the nude offers the richest meaning.
Auguste Rodin
You miss a lot of wonderful as well as historic art if the nude is denounced.
B. J. Adams
When I began to photograph nudes, I let myself be guided by this camera, and instead of photographing what I saw, I photographed what the camera was seeing.
I interfered very little, and the lens produced anatomical images and shapes which my eyes had never observed.
Bill Brandt, photographer
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On Rigoberto Rodriguez
It is not easy to sense, or catch, that fleeting moment when, for instance, a rock gels to feminine shapeliness precisely at the same moment that a woman?s beauty attains the perpetuity of stone. Only an eye standing permanent watch may capture the rich concurrence of two kingdoms of nature without slipping into the neighboring field of pornography. This fly on the wall is enamored.
Carlos Cesar Rodriguez
Often a certain tenderness and love is felt capturing the nude’s special beauty and spirit in paint.
It is a romance with the subject and the canvas, and it’s very seductive.
Coulter Watt
NIRVANA – 36 x 60″ acrylic on canvas – A.D. Cook
Naked is a human commodity. Nudity is God’s art.
David Allio
When women pose thoughtfully and artistically – in nothing but their bare skin – they find themselves.
They discover that they are truly alive. They become a Nude.
David Allio
I remember trying not to disrupt everyone else in the room, fumbling around trying to figure out how to use the medium with a beautiful model disrobed in front of me?
Don Watson
A pretty girl who is naked – is worth a million statues
E. E. Cummings
Hitherto the nude has always been represented in poses which presuppose an audience.
But my women are simple, honest creatures who are concerned with nothing beyond their physical occupations, it is as if you were looking through a keyhole.
Edgar Degas
Nudity is a problem for Americans.
It disrupts our social exchange.
Eric Fischl
I couldn’t portray a woman in all her natural loveliness. I haven’t the skill.
No one has. I must, therefore, create a new sort of beauty?
Georges Braque
The best thing is to draw men and women from the nude and thus fix in the memory by constant exercise the muscles of the torso, back, legs, arms and knees, with bones underneath.
Giorgio Vasari
We must look for the pure essence of the human body and not the niggling details that sometimes clutter up the flow of form.
Harley Brown
A. D. Cook
Guest blog by artist A. D. Cook
Sept 20, 2014