Bedroom Mural

Nearly four years ago, soon after my husband and I bought our house, I painted a "Once Upon a Time" inspired mural on one wall of our bedroom. I detailed the process of painting it in this blog post on my old blog - Interior Design: Blue, Gray & Black Woodsy Bedroom.

My inspiration was the Regina's office in season 1 of "Once Upon a Time" on ABC. I have since stopped watching this show (the last season finally went too far off the deep end for me to care at all about the characters or plot anymore), but the first few seasons were really solid, the first season especially.

Set design for Regina's Office on "OUAT"

Now, my design was obviously a simplified version of these trees, with only four trees and no "background" trees fading into the distance. But the general "black and white" woodsy idea is the same.

The lines are pretty crisp (with very light gray and dark black, the contrast was pretty high - I didn't have much choice on "crispness") but I tried to keep the insides of the trunks loose. The "details" in the bark are just dabs the size of my paintbrush, and every once and while up the tree I made a little circular tree knob in the bark.

I didn't go into it planning on making vagina symbols, but a lot of them sort of ended up looking that way, if you looked at the knob details up close:

I didn't initially intend the genital imagery, but I didn't exactly tone it down once I noticed they sort of looked like stylized vulva folds, either. I continued on with the mural, painting many more of those "knobs" along the trees as I went. Partly for consistency's sake, partly because I liked the way it looked, partly because I liked what it represented, and partly because it's a painting on the wall of my bedroom, the room I share with my husband, and I don't really care what people think of it. Very few people ever see it anyway; if I didn't post these pictures on this blog (or my previous blog, four years ago), even fewer would.

Maybe I see vaginas because I've looked for female genital symbolism in other artworks and purposefully incorporated them into my own; but given how prevalent seeing vaginas in Georgia O'Keeffe's work remains to this day, despite how ardently she denied using intentional vulva imagery, I'm betting I'm not the only one who sees it.

I don't always mean to make my work feminist or feminine or to have a specific message, but sometimes that stuff creeps in anyway - just because they are things on my mind, or things I've done before. It's like "muscle memory" - after working on my thesis watercolors from 2009-2010 the idea of incorporating female genital symbolism was still familiar enough in my mind and to my paintbrush-holding hand that I added it in even when I didn't start out with that goal.

I don't think, "Oh, vaginas!" every time I go into my bedroom. I think of that stylized sort of design as sort of a mix of genitalia and general "femaleness" anyway - the idea of "central core imagery," which includes but is not limited to vaginas. They're little vortexes folded into lines of paint dabs. They don't have to mean anything if I don't wish them to. We can always choose what we see or interpret in art, and that interpretation may evolve over time, or vacillate from day to day. But on days when I need a reminder that femininity is not weak, that bodies are beautiful, that sexuality is not something to be ashamed of, or that moments of meaning can be hidden in anything if we look hard enough or choose to put them there - it is nice to have those vaginas on my wall to give me that reminder.