Brushing Up the Female Icon

Hillary Clinton chose self-taught artist Ginny Stanford to evoke her "timelessness" as First Lady --and to render the "movement" of her legally blonde hair (?)-- in Renaissance-inspired profile for display by the newly renovated National Portrait Gallery beginning in July. Source: New York Times.

Stanford once captured food critic MFK Fisher on canvas, that portrait now hanging in the National Gallery's permanent collection.

She was introduced to Fisher in 1991, one year before the writer's death. She sought to paint the image of a courageous older woman "who could look unflinchingly at herself." (Might some among us choose that as the more influential and timeless of these two cultural creations?)

"Through her artful essays on food and life, which she first began writing in France in the 1930s, Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher transformed the mundane activity of eating into a passion. A unique blend of thoughtful instruction, sense-awakening recipes, and reflections on life's values, Fisher's writing is everywhere informed by her conviction that our basic human needs for love, shelter, and food are indivisibly connected."

Still, this new Clinton portrait is stunning to me, in my view more classic and tranquil than its subject generally appears in any two dimensions.

Hillary Clinton remains only image for me, like the portrait population of Hogwarts who even as fully animated subjects, are framed permanently, firmly bound within the two dimensional world. However classic and compelling their images may be, I've never seen public personae beyond that realm and never expect I will, so for me, that is the sum total of their reality.

As a somewhat courageous, somewhat older woman, I endeavor to examine this unflinchingly . . .

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