Art Heals: Getting Dressed

My interest in art has always been wide-ranging.  While painting and drawing have always been my first love (not sure why—perhaps because there are so many ways to make a bit of color or ink on a surface come alive) I admire all forms.  I don’t hold with the distinctions made between fine art and craft—in my opinion, if something is made by hand, made well, original, the materials from which it is made are irrelevant to its beauty and value as art.  To me Rauschenberg’s Combines put paid to that argument a long time ago.  Also, when I can afford to, I like to support the independent clothes designers and jewelers whose creations fall under the rubric “wearable art.” 

Sonia Delaunay, an artist of equal talent to her more famous husband, Robert, painted stunning multi-hued canvases on the principle of simultané, a concept in which the contrast of colors creates dynamism, championed by Sonia and Robert all their lives.  But Sonia also designed, made (and wore) vibrantly chromatic garments.  Early on she stitched a little blanket for her baby son, a patchwork of pink, cream, green, maroon and black, not exactly typical of baby blankets in 1911. Her dresses were bright, abstract, and made for dancing, something she also loved.  As mentioned in a review of a retrospective of her work at the Tate in London,

“It may also have been that Sonia and other modernists saw no distinction between fine art and applied art. She was after all a cross‑cultural polyglot, accustomed to translating and changing modes of expression. Why shouldn’t her aesthetic manifest itself now as a painting on a wall, now as a dress, now as a book-binding? Her art was wearable, it was the lifestyle statement of a new breed: the creative modern woman.”

So getting dressed for me is a way of supporting, honoring and enjoying the work of the talented artists who dye,  weave, stitch, bend, fold and shape mere fabric into kinetic sculptures for me to dance in every day, even if just on a visit to the grocery store. Same goes for jewelry, whether I am wearing a torqued silver bracelet made by a silversmith from the hill tribes of Thailand, or a necklace formed of ping pong balls, wire and ingenuity.

I saw a sign the other day, while I was on my daily walk, that read “Dress for the day you want to have.”  Now that we are working-from-home, staying-at-home, sheltering-in-place, with no one but our companions in isolation and our mirrors to note how we appear, it might be easy to abjure “getting dressed.”  But for me, I won’t cede that pleasure to the virus.   The day I want to have is filled with art, so I’m going to dress for it.

A painting by Gamila Nawar with a lady in my favorite color, red, and a neckpiece by Annemarie Feld, might inspire you today.  (And for the guys, my companion in isolation wears a French-cuffed shirt to the office (aka guestroom laptop) every day, except one, when he wears a turtleneck and calls it casual Friday.)