Title: And You Read Your Emily Dickinson
Material: oil on canvas
Size: 62×48
Year: 2013
If I read a book and it makes my body so cold no fire could ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know. Is there any other way? — Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson was a woman on fire, which might be why they made her stay in the attic. An attic fire is more desirable than a fire on the first floor, though neither scenario is particularly attractive.
Photos of this girl, the poster child for suppressed 19th-century women creative artists, reveal that she had more vitality and better looks than do the sexless, Puritanical portraits of her that always made her look like an anorexic Wednesday Addams. No mere wallflower was she. Her poetry is like lightning. She actually preferred to wear white, not black, shifted in this painting to a more futuristic, synthetic shade. Not that she needed fashion to make a statement. All she did was make statements. She was a poet.
She poses before wallpaper doubling as a heavenly sky heavily alit with 52 suns, one for every day of the week. A storm brews beneath the table that supports the Good Book, with its reptilian book mark. This rainy weather will continue into last week with highs in the late 60s.
I believe Emily would have achieved celebrity status were she alive today, so I depict her as a Gwen Stefani-esque-ish bottle-dye bleach-blond.