Laura Ross-Paul: Miracle Works

LAURA R O S S - PA U L

MIRACLE WORKS

L AUR A R O SS- PAU L

MIRACLE WORKS Artwork Inspired by a Breast-Saving Miracle

With an essay by Sue Taylor and an interview

by Linda Tesner

Laura Ross-Paul, Portland, Ore. https://www.lauraross-paul.com © 2021 Laura Ross-Paul Design by Emerson Creative, Portland, Ore. Photography by Aaron Johanson Photography, Portland, Ore., pp. 14-23 Ken Dixon, image: portrait, p. 44 Lommasson Pictures, LLC, Portland, Ore., pp. 2-3, 5, 7, 8-9, 11, 12, 24-43, 48

Cover: Blue Dress, 2020, inks, wax, resin, oil on board, 20 X 16 in. (photo: Aaron Johanson) Right: Red Sari, 2020, inks, wax, resin, oil on board, 20 x 16 in. (photo: Aaron Johanson) Back cover: Red/Pink, 2016, oil and wax on board, each 10 X 10 in. (photo: Lommasson Pictures, LLC)

This catalog is funded by grants from The Ford Family Foundation, Roseburg, Ore., and the Oregon Arts Commission, Salem.

Sepia Torso, 2018, walnut and sumi ink on mineral paper, 12 X 9 in. (photo: Lommasson Pictures, LLC)

“If cryoablation is so good, why haven’t I heard about it?” This is the most asked question when I tell women that I saved my breast and likely got an immunity by using it to treat my breast cancer.

Laura Ross-Paul

Breast tumor cryoablation is a minimally invasive procedure that is a substitute for surgery. This office-based, single-day procedure only requires local anesthesia. Cryoablation substantially reduces the morbidity, psychosocial, and cosmetic impact of traditional surgical breast cancer therapy.

Dennis R. Holmes, M.D., F.A.C.S. Breast surgeon, FROST Trial principal investigator www.cryoblation.com

White Skirt, 2020, inks, wax, resin, oil on board, 20 X 16 in.

Contents

1 Introduction 3

“Navigating Rough Waters” Linda Tesner and Laura Ross-Paul in Conversation

15 Plates 25 “Syncretism and Empathy”

Sue Taylor 42 Acknowledgments 44 Contributors

Red Skirt, 2020, inks, wax, resin, oil on board, 20 X 16 in. (photo: Aaron Johanson)

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Introduction

by Laura Ross-Paul How do women see themselves? How do they see their bodies?

For most women, having two breasts defines a body-image as being born a female. Unfortunately for many women facing breast cancer, remaining two-breasted sometimes is no longer is an option.

As a young girl, I used to love to watch my mother getting dressed.

I loved her so much that every aspect of her body was special to me. So when a radical mastectomy scarred her beautiful body it hit me as if someone had defaced the Mona Lisa. Decades later, I was diagnosed with breast cancer myself, and it appeared that the only way to save my life was with a mastectomy. Then a miracle befell me. When my husband’s research revealed that a procedure called cryoablation could kill my cancer by freezing it, I found I had a chance to be one of the first women in America to receive this type of treatment, and avoid a mastectomy.

Deciding to move forward with cryoablation forced me to face my fears head-on, because my local doctors said I was risking my life with an experimental procedure. I became a Patient Pioneer and an advocate for cryoablation after my successful treatment in 2003. My cancer has not returned in all these years. Co-authoring a book with my cryoablation surgeon and my husband—They’re Mine and I’m Keeping Them—led to my online advocacy for cryoablation, KeepingThem.com. As a result, I became a virtual confidant at an intense level to hundreds of women who had to fight battles similar to mine in order to secure cryoablation.

Because I’m a painter, my journey from victim to pioneer to triumphant advocate has been reflected in my artwork. Besides advocating for two-breastedness, my work celebrates it. Developing these paintings and drawings has enhanced my feelings of sisterhood with women everywhere. Our bodies were made in a perfect design. They are worth preserving.

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Navigating Rough Waters Linda Tesner and Laura Ross-Paul in Conversation Linda Tesner: Let’s start with your artistic beginnings.

You are well known as a figurative artist in the Pacific Northwest. Have you always been primarily interested in the human figure?

Laura Ross-Paul: My career started in high school when I was the artist for our yearbook, which won a big national prize. I developed a graphic style that was quite sophisticated. (In fact, those early drawings stand up to this day and were reproduced for our fiftieth class reunion!) As an undergrad at Oregon State University, I became the artist for the underground newspaper, the Scab Sheet. I drew figures for political cartoons, and I saw their power. We closed the school down for antiVietnam War protests and effected much change. At that time I was studying pre-nursing, but this activity put me in touch with art as my calling. A college counselor planted the idea that I was a talented figurative artist, and should think about making a career out of it.

LT: While you were in college, were any of the San Francisco figurative artists influential at that time? I’m thinking of Elmer Bischoff, early Richard Diebenkorn, David Park, or Joan Brown?

LRP: I studied art history in college, so even before I assimilated the influence of contemporary artists, I responded to the Indian and Persian miniatures taught in my Asian art history classes, with their bright colors and narrative imagery. I also came to admire Chinese and Japanese brush paintings. But then, yes, my inspirations definitely included the Bay Area figurative artists you mention. Then later Nathan Oliveira, whom I met when he was a guest artist in college.

Interrupted Landscape, 2020, inks, wax, resin, oil on board, 30 X 30 in.

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LT: I also wonder if you were inspired by Oregon artists who focused on the figure? When you were a student, for example, Michele Russo would have been in the prime of his career—although I think that his use of the human figure, the nude, is more about formal considerations than the emotive content evident in your work.

LRP: While working on my MFA at Portland State University, I served on a committee at the Portland Center for the Visual Arts; some of the New York figurative artists who showed there made a big impression, including Leon Golub and especially Alice Neel, whose paintings are imbued with such energy, color, and personal psychology. As for Oregon artists, painters like Mike Russo were friendly but distant. I got early representation at Arlene Schnitzer’s Fountain Gallery, where Mike and most of my professors showed; since I was so young, it was hard to have a collegial relationship with them. But two women in the gallery’s stable, Shirley Gittelsohn and Lucinda Parker, took me under their wings. Lucinda continues to be a huge influence with her bold brush marks, her large scale, her bright intense color, and her general mark-making confidence.

LT: Given how distinctive your paintings remain, even in this regional context, it seems to me that whatever influence Portland artists exerted on you has been more personal than stylistic.

LRP: I think you’re right, and in that regard, I must also mention New York artist Susan Weil, mother of my photographer friend Chris Rauschenberg, with her wonderful images connecting human figures and spirit to the natural world. During her visits to Portland, Susan encouraged me during my mothering years. In recent pandemic months, I’ve been cheered by this ninety-year-old’s daily practice of sharing her art and poetry via email. Her remarkable creativity removes any fear about my ability to continue making art as I age.

LT: Are there other figurative artists working now that particularly resonate with you? I am energized by the fairly recent international resurgence of figurative painting. The German Neo Rauch comes to mind, so does the Canadian Kent Monkman. And in the US, there’s Kerry James Marshall, Henry Taylor, so many others. Here in Oregon, Daniel Duford has taken up the historic figure of John Brown in pictorial narratives that address contemporary issues

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Red Lungs, 2020, inks, wax, resin, oil on board, 24 X 24 in.

around social justice. But I don’t think that storytelling is what your figurative work tries to do, is it? I always feel that your work is about conveying emotion.

LRP: All those talented artists you mention are men grappling with societal concerns in their work. My work comes from a more internal, personal perspective. Certainly I have looked carefully at other figurative painters—artists like Eric Fischl and Peter Doig, as well as the figurative, photo-derived, overpainted work of Gerhard Richter. Whatever I glean from them in terms of style, it must register unconsciously. Fundamentally for me, making a painting is akin to speaking in a language that is visual. It is communication without words, and you’re correct in that the content of my painting has to do with human emotion and psychology.

LT: In our conversations over the past many years, I know that you are deeply in touch with what Carl Jung called the collective uncon-

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Pink Boat #2, 2016, watercolor, wax, resin, oil on board, 16 1/2 X 83 1/2 in.

scious. Could you address that, both in terms of how this theme turns up in your studio practice and in your personal life?

LRP: I reflect a lot on the larger group mind or collective, specifically in these times of separation and divided thinking. What connects us? My current series, “Breath,” explores this question metaphorically. We all breathe and often exchange each other’s air, whether we are in alignment or not. And I think that our connectedness has to do with intention. My mom, a student of metaphysics, taught me that the collective, that aspect of God that is in all of us, puts thoughts and desires in our heads to let us know what is uniquely needed from us—our special gift—to add to the good of the collective. We hold onto those desires and realize them through intention. Believing that a desire comes from God for the good of all is a great inspiration to me.

I learned how intention works by studying the noetic sciences in the late 1980s and 1990s. A major figure in noetics was the NASA astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell. (He died in 2016). Coming back from the moon in 1971, he had a spiritual epiphany when he saw our beautiful blue planet perfectly in its place, resonating with all space around it. He set about to enlist fellow scientists to help him show how we are all connected and, by harnessing this connectivity, can make our personal intentions come to pass. I subscribed to these research reports in the years before getting cancer, so I was already well poised to set an intention—to have a science-based medical treatment that allowed me to keep my breast even though the odds of that happening were almost impossible. I was able to find a doctor who needed a breast-cancer patient to try

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out the technique of cryoablation. Since 2003, I have remained two-breasted and cancer free. Because my personal intention experiment turned out so beautifully, I am always wondering where else in my life it will work.

LT: Much of your art deals with your experience having breast cancer, your decision to seek non-traditional treatment, and your activism to help other women facing breast cancer consider treatment options. You describe this journey eloquently in several series, including “Visual Code.”

LRP: I had never done an installation before “Visual Code” and wanted to stretch my art-making muscle. The panels create a constellation of seven interrelated clusters, each illustrating an aspect of my own evolution through my cancer journey—like Stations of

Hand Hold (Diptych), 2016, Figment charcoal, watercolor, wax, resin, oil on board, 35 X 50 in.

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Visual Code Installation, North View Gallery, Portland Community College, Sylvania, 2016, figment charcoal, watercolor, wax, resin, oil on board, 45 feet overall

the Cross. In the first cluster, a dark figure with a light background holds hands with a light figure on a dark background (see p. 7).

Symbolically I was thinking about the inner strength it took to oppose traditional medical advice. The subsequent six groupings symbolize other aspects of my story: giving in to my decision to try cryoablation; finding support in a foreign land (China); feelings of isolation while negotiating with experts; accepting an advocacy role to counsel other women; watching others navigate their individual journeys; and finally my determination to help all women save their breasts from cancer.

LT: What inspired you in other series, in “Givers and Receivers,” for instance, to reference iconic works from the history of art, especially the Italian Renaissance?

LRP: As a figure painter, I’ve always admired Michelangelo, especially how he uses body language and facial expression to convey emotion and draw you into his narrative. While getting ready to go to Europe in 1998, I read his collected letters and found that a deep, if not quite conventional, spirituality drove his work. This helped me understand his project when I visited the Sistine Chapel. The powerful Old Testament prophets and Greek sibyls, the largest figures on the ceiling, impressed me greatly.

For “Givers and Receivers,” I was attempting to depict how I, and others, might go about making a very tough decision. Since cryoablation is still considered experimental, women choosing this route are “Patient Pioneers” (a term I made up to describe my own position to other women wanting to follow my path) and have to strengthen their resolve to move forward. In olden times, people turned to wise ones and oracles. Michelangelo’s prophets and sybils, who all foretold Christ’s coming, provided the metaphor.

Their images could serve the idea of seeking wisdom before making an important decision—like asking your big sister or brother what to do. I used the Libyan and Delphic sibyls and the prophet Daniel as representations of someone giving positive advice about the future.

In each of the three images, my daughter-in-law posed for the figure of everywoman as modern wisdom seeker. I asked her to echo the oracles’ body language to show she was in sync with them.

The floating spheres that surround the figures suggest whatever

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you want them to—questions, answers, advice, truth. They are breast-sized and to me represent an abundance of breasts surviving in the future. So it’s my personal symbolic language, inspired

by Michelangelo’s symbolic language.

LT: As an art historian, I’m fascinated by the way you’ve found such personal relevance in the art of the past. Your recent reprise of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus in “Givers and Receivers” is another example.

LRP: The ancient Greeks worshiped Venus as the goddess of love, and in Western art she has been seen as an embodiment of female beauty. In Botticelli’s painting, she gazes off, and seems

Givers and Receivers (Triptych), 2019, walnut, sumi, iridescent inks on TerraSkin, each 78 X 40 in.

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Venus’ Radar, 2019, walnut, sumi, and iridescent inks on TerraSkin, 78 X 59 in.

absorbed in thought. What is this ideal woman reflecting on? Is she thinking about her female nature? Do her breasts represent that? Every woman I talk to who must decide how to treat her breast cancer struggles with such questions. In The Birth of Venus, Botticelli uses silvery white lines to represent the breath of her attending nymphs, blowing her to shore. It occurred to me in Venus’ Radar that these could instead suggest radiating news of a new gold standard in breast-cancer treatment. Is Venus reacting to the silver and golden radar enveloping her? Her expression suggests that she is at peace.

LT: In your “Life for Breasts” series, you also reference Chinese and Japanese ink-painting techniques, and I wonder what it is about that work, of another era and culture, that inspires you?

LRP: I’ve made four trips to China, two as a guest speaker at International Cancer Forums. My gracious Chinese hosts always wanted to help me experience something of their culture. They exposed me to both ancient and contemporary sumi work. I completely fell under its spell. The fluid stroke carries the chi or energy of the concentrated moment it was born. I admire this medium so much because you don’t have to capture a photo likeness, just an energetic impression that will have a universal read to it.

LT: In looking at these different bodies of work, I am struck by your fearlessness in using new and sometimes non-traditional materials.

LRP: Each series represents an opportunity for me to try out a new medium, or new ways of using a medium. Ironically, I find that as I get older and become more adept at painting, my inspiration comes from technical challenges. I’ve been lucky to be an early paint tester for Gamblin Artist’s Colors, and to count Gamblin product developer Martha Bergman as a good friend. Martha often encourages me to explore different materials and products. These can take years to conquer, and several bodies of work in this project resulted from such novel explorations.

LT: You are painting your newest series, “The New Gold Standard,” during the unprecedented time of a global pandemic amid American social and political unrest. How have these current events, this moment in history, affected your work?

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LRP: Although I typically draw from the live model, and often in group sessions, during the shutdown I’ve turned to old magazines, my own photos, books, and catalogs for “The New Gold Standard.” I take a head from here, a body or body part from there, a background from wherever, and put them all together to represent a figure I identify with, no matter the body type. My hope is that everyone viewing this work will personally identify with the femaleness of the figures, either as a representation of themselves or of someone they know.

My doctor, Peter Littrup, did his research out of Wayne State University in Detroit, which has a large Black population. During my trips to Detroit and subsequently, I formed many close relationships with Black women I met through my journey. Their stories are often my biggest motivators, and I want my art to resonate with them. The impetus for this series is to depict women from all over the world who are unified in two-breasted femaleness. By using a layering technique—painting the figure naChopsticks, 2020, inks, wax, resin, oil on board, 20 X 16 in. ked first, then adding clothes, then wiping through the oil to reveal two breasts—my intention is to convey the possibility of using the most breast-conserving treatment for cancer. “Gold standard” is the term physicians use to describe the treatment with the best statistical outcome. Women want to use cryoablation if they know about it. Through my artwork, I want to help alert them to this option. “The New Gold Standard” expresses my hope for women everywhere.

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Plates

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Colorful Jacket, 2020, inks, wax, resin, oil on board, 20 X 16 in.

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Pink Shawl, 2020, inks, wax, resin, oil on board, 20 X 16 in.

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Left: Tie Dye, 2020, inks, wax, resin, oil on board, 20 X 16 in.

Above: Blue Earrings, 2020, inks, wax, resin, oil on board, 20 X 16 in.

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Big Hat, 2020, inks, wax, resin, oil on board, 20 X 16 in.

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Black Veil, 2020, inks, wax, resin, oil on board, 20 X 16 in.

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Above: Big Fur, 2020, inks, wax, resin, oil on board, 20 X 16 in.

Right: Striped Jacket, 2020, inks, wax, resin, oil on board, 20 X 16 in.

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Above: Small Cross, 2020, inks, wax, resin, oil on board, 20 X 16 in.

Right: Blue Dress, 2020, inks, wax, resin, oil on board, 20 X 16 in.

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Syncretism and Empathy

by Sue Taylor

“What is a nude?” demanded art historian Griselda Pollock more than a decade ago, interrogating a convention entrenched in Western art since the Renaissance. “A study of anatomy?

A statement of aesthetic principle? A declaration of heterosexual masculine desire? What is the female body when painted by a woman artist?”1 To this last query, Laura Ross-Paul asserts that the body is a form to be celebrated.2 Such is her goal in the drawings that make up her Sumi Scroll Series (2017-19), a highly original, even radical project for this esteemed figure painter in the Pacific Northwest. These powerful nudes relate uneasily to an artistic tradition whose patriarchal premises were exposed by feminists like Pollock, while also departing from Ross-Paul’s own established practice.

Often in her paintings she has situated the body in nature, amidst forests or waterfalls, treating it as a metaphor—for fragility or balance, for example, or for the possibility of transcendence in some mystical mental state. It is a familiar strategy in art history, at least through the nineteenth century, in which the female nude stands, not for a woman, but for an abstract concept such as liberty, fertility, or truth. Devoid of such symbolism and certainly of the mythological or biblical trappings that once framed the naked female figure in the Grand Manner, the modern nudes in Ross-Paul’s sumi series are instead expressive empirical studies of the model directly engaged in the studio.

Left: Protective Gesture, 2018, walnut and sumi ink on mineral paper, 20 X 14 1/2 in.

Above: Joan, 2018, china watercolor and sumi ink on mineral paper, 12 X 9 in.

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Simple descriptive titles signal the artist’s formal concerns—Delicate Colors, Golden Knees, Red Curve.

Occasionally the title corresponds to the first name of an otherwise anonymous model. The drawings’ sensuous beauty depends on RossPaul’s adept use of her chosen medium, sumi ink, sometimes supplemented with watercolor and walnut or iridescent acrylic ink. Ross-Paul discovered the possibilities of sumi ink on a visit to China, where it was invented during the Tang Dynasty (618-907 CE) and is manufactured to this day, and she references the East Asian source of her inspiration in the works’ presentation. Executed on Chinese rock paper made from ground sea shells and marble, her drawings are mounted on rice paper and hung from bamboo dowels.

Materially then, and all at once, the work expresses delicacy, endurance, and strength, while turning an age-old tradition to entirely unanticipated ends. Common subjects in sumi ink drawings include flowers, birds, and landscapes—never nudes. (Far from universal, the nude is instead a thoroughly Western motif.) Underscoring the syncretic East-West aspect of her project, Ross-Paul signs and dates her drawings in pencil, in the lower right corner or sometimes along the left edge, and adds two signature seals in red ink. Acquired in China, the jade stamps that produce these decorative imprints bear the artist’s first and last names, respectively, in standard Latin script and in Chinese characters. Although in the West a penciled signature is meant to be overlooked in the contemplation of the image, the red seals become compositional elements in themselves, and their arrangement is a matter of thoughtful aesthetic judgment.

Ross-Paul did not create the sumi nudes in her own private studio but rather in three-hour life-drawing sessions in the company of other artists. For more than twenty years, this fluid group of mostly

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Left: Point, 2018, walnut and sumi ink on mineral paper, 20 X 14 1/2 in.

Above: Red Curve, 2018, china watercolor, sumi and irridescent ink on mineral paper,12 X 9 in.

Contemplative Stare, 2019, walnut, sumi and iridescent ink on mineral paper, 12 X 9 in.

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women artists living or summering along the Oregon Coast had been meeting regularly to practice from the nude. In rented space in Manzanita or in nearby Nehalem, in a disused house, storage room, or painting studio, as many as ten but typically four or five artists at a time worked from models hired by the sessions’ organizer, art teacher Judy Sorrels. “Judy was fearless about finding models,” Ross-Paul reports, “and often went up to store clerks or someone at the farmers’ market to ask if they’d ever consider taking their clothes off to model for artists. She would also put out an ask on the community’s list serve. . . . Word got around, and some experienced college life-class models who were now living at the coast became the backbone of our stable.”3 In this ad hoc, quasi-professional context, where sociability flourished, Ross-Paul embarked on her sumi series. By her account, working conditions in the “Judy Group” were liberatory for her: When it was just us gals, we got into a lazy banter, talking about things going on in the community....Sometimes the model participated in the dialogue. Most of the older women were ready with advice for the younger models if advice became a topic of conversation. I became very bonded in female nurturing. We were so supportive of each others’ creative efforts and for the appreciation of the human form and for the simplicity and joy of life in general. It was in this environment that I felt most comfortable to experiment with the new materials I’d been so impressed by after visiting China.

My life-drawing mates encouraged me greatly, and I happily shared these materials with them.

Primary Sitter, 2018, walnut and sumi ink and chinese watercolor on mineral paper, 20 X 14 1/2 in.

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Delicate Colors, 2018, walnut and sumi ink on mineral paper, 20 X 14 1/2 in.

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It is fascinating to consider how this social formation, reminiscent of the knitting circle or quilting bee, almost completely revises the artistic convention from which it derives. Introduced into the curriculum of newly founded European art academies in the late eighteenth century, the life-drawing class consisted exclusively of men, supervised by a male instructor, working from a male or (less often at first) a female model. Female students were barred from the academies until the late nineteenth century and even then were not permitted to study the nude. Generally speaking, it was only in the twentieth century that women gained full access to this type of formal training. In the meantime, the life-drawing class remained the preserve of men. To assuage public suspicions about the propriety of exposing the naked body of a working-class woman to a group of young unmarried gentlemen, a strict protocol developed. Students and models were not allowed to speak to each other.4 An ironic result of this etiquette was that the female model, the object of everyone’s focused visual attention, was at the same time ignored as a person. A kind of fourth wall sealed her off from those scrutinizing her body, a protective device which could also dehumanize her: as recently as the 1970s, a model at the Slade School of Art in London would weep while posing, later confiding to painter Celia Paul how hurt she was that students never talked to her, even during breaks.5 The contrast with the warmly interpersonal, communal atmosphere that prevailed in Ross-Paul’s life sessions could not be more dramatic.

The Judy Group’s departure from protocol reminds us how “the conventional nude is neither natural nor normal, but the result of centuries of consolidated art practice.”6 Paid to be looked at by an audience, the artist’s model may be compared with the actor (without the role), dancer (without the music), or runway model (without the clothes). Occasionally during Ross-Paul’s prior years teaching at Portland State University, the model provided for her life-painting class would be a crossover from a local strip club. Strippers were the worst models, according to Ross-Paul, confusing the goals of a certain kind of provocative exhibitionist spectacle with those of a very different, disinterested demonstration. Although the gendered nature of spectatorship—in which men do the (active) looking and women are (passively) looked at—has been much discussed relative to film and to painting,7 artist-model relations in the life class remain largely undiscussed and under theorized.8 It is a complicated state of affairs, additionally informed by psychic identifications

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and projections in this case where artists and model are both female. “Looking (or producing) as a woman,” Rosemary Betterton contends, “is dependent on a certain consciousness that such looking is, or could be, different from a masculine viewpoint. Such consciousness in turn depends on a recognition that women’s social and cultural experience is itself differently arrived at.”9 Presumably shared by women in the Judy Group, this unspoken awareness helps explain why their companionable dynamic changed awkwardly whenever the occasional male artist participated.

Artist-model relations register in many of RossPaul’s sumi nudes as shared authority, the artist in confident command of her process and the model with decided power over her representation. Ross-Paul describes how her ambition in the life sessions was “to rise to the challenge of what the model may throw at you, and to make something of it,” and indeed certain formal aspects of the drawings stress the model’s active agency.

The nude’s imposing body invariably looms close to the picture plane and, refusing containment, often exceeds the borders of the composition. All the drawings, save for the single instance of Sepia Rest where the day-dreaming nude lies prone on a cot, are vertical in orientation, whether the model stands, sits, or reclines. Figures are positioned at eye level or above—to the point even of intimidation in the gloriously imperious Point (p. 26). When a model makes eye contact with the viewer, we sense her equanimity. The best example of this may be found in Active Spine (p. 36), an image of a seated, cross-legged figure who turns her head to offer a gentle smile, exuding a glowing vitality and supreme self-possession.

Even when the nude is most immobile, for instance in Sepia Rest Left: Resting on Red, 2018, china watercolor, walnut and sumi ink on mineral paper, 20 X 14 1/2 in.

Above: Sepia Rest, 2018, walnut and sumi ink on mineral paper, 14 1/2 X 20 in.

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or Resting on Red, we get a strong impression of an inner life that’s all her own. In the latter picture, the supine nude, propped on a red-patterned cushion, conjures Matisse’s odalisques in decorative interiors, but Ross-Paul presents her close up, level with the viewer (as if we were kneeling before her), with a fixed, profile gaze that suggests her complete absorption in a private mental world.

She is imperturbable and unavailable, despite her bodily exposure.

With such strategies, Ross-Paul resolves to the greatest possible degree a problem that has troubled feminists since the 1970s, namely, whether any representation of the naked female body may serve further to objectify women in a patriarchal culture.

If in that culture being looked at and sized up is a common experience for women—a phenomenon thematized even in ancient times in the story of the first beauty pageant, the Judgment of Paris—a woman artist may readily empathize with the model before her.

And because both artist and model inhabit the same kind of body, that empathy may be somatic as well as psychic: “You will start feeling it in your own body,” Ross-Paul explains. “You look at the model and it’s like a mirror.” Too little is made in analyses of the artist-model relationship of the dynamic Ross-Paul describes here, of deeply felt empathy and identification, when the sight of the naked female body sparks comparisons, conscious or unconscious, with the artist’s own. It is a far cry from the dominance-subjection paradigm that has historically characterized the position of the male artist relative to his female model,10 as well as from the hostile aggression enacted, no matter how comically, by Thomas Rowlandson in the life class in 1772 when he attacked the model with a peashooter.11 Instead we find evidence of Ross-Paul’s sympathetic response to the model’s vulnerability in her titling of Protective Gesture (p. 24), in which she interprets the hand-to-heart action as a defense, even though the model’s breast remains exposed.

The figure’s hunched posture and sideways glance recall an athlete at the starting line of a race, poised to spring into action; because of her nudity, however, she might be read as shying away from an intrusive gaze, like Susanna surprised at her bath by leering elders in the Bible. Sensitive to the latter possibility, Ross-Paul takes the pose as an attempt to shield the body from some perceived menace.

Either way, the figure seems caught, in a manner reminiscent of Suzanne Valadon’s remarkable female nudes in the early twentieth Gold Knees, 2018, walnut, sumi and iridescent ink on mineral paper, 20 X 14 1/2 in.

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century, “in the intensity of a particular moment of action rather than a static and timeless vision.”12 Unique among her contemporaries, Valadon focused in her paintings and drawings not on the nude as erotic spectacle but rather, as Betterton further observes, “on the relationship between women’s state of mind and their experience of their bodies in the process of changing and ageing.” Ross-Paul carries this investigation to an entirely new level in her sumi series, exploiting the nature of her medium to arrive at a perfect integration of form and content, where the liquid ink and watercolor drip and flow, literalizing the very fact and inevitability of change before our eyes. Significantly, too, Ross-Paul expunges her customary blues, greens, and yellow from the palette in most of her sumi nudes, retaining shades of sepia, black, brown, and red—the colors of flesh and of blood. In the splendid Head Down, the dribbling and puddling of ink towards the bottom of the image record the inexorable pull of gravity over time, and although the artist’s concern in this work was surely with the skillful foreshortening of the head and torso and the compositionally dynamic disposition of limbs, the model’s reclining pose with raised legs is coincidentally—as some viewers will recognize—a way to relieve menstrual cramps.

One thinks of the abject body analyzed by Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror (1980), a body that leaks—blood, tears, urine, saliva, milk.13 That body, Kristeva proposes, is horrifying because its boundaries are breached, its substances indeterminately of it and yet not of it, inside then outside. Among the most powerful of Ross-Paul’s drawings in terms of the abject must be Guardian, where the model’s face is obliterated, and her pose suggests a Above: Active Spine, 2018, walnut ink, watercolor on mineral paper, 20 X 14 1/2 in.

Right: Head Down, 2018, walnut and sumi ink, watercolor on mineral paper, 20 X 14 1/2 in.

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weary surrender. It is a spooky image of the deliquescence or liquefaction of the flesh, conveyed by means of a dilute medium in deft hands. The body’s contours and internal details dissolve in a series of ghostly wet-on-wet effects; there remains only an impression of mortality, a fact and a fear made palpable in ink.

Perhaps emboldened by the supportive atmosphere of other women, Ross-Paul could summon in Guardian a penultimate vision of the body changing, melting over time. Given the artist’s stated intention in the sumi series to celebrate the female form, the image seems anomalous in the extreme, yet the kind of truth it offers is hardly exceptional. It is rather the naked and universal truth of corporeal experience—not just for women but for everyone. We are a long way in the sumi series from Kenneth Clark’s classic formulation of the nude as an ideal form clothed in art, opposed, that is, to the merely naked and defenseless biological body.14 Such distinctions and the protocols that produced them collapse in Ross-Paul’s empathic treatment of the female body as an existential, experiential reality. _________________________________________________________ Notes 1. Griselda Pollock, “Modigliani and the Bodies of Art: Carnality, Attentiveness, and the Modernist Struggle,” in Mason Klein, ed., Modigliani: Beyond the Myth (New York: Jewish Museum, 2004), 64.

2. Interview with the author, Portland, Ore., 12 December 2019.

Unless otherwise noted, all other observations by the artist referenced in this essay derive from this in-person conversation.

3. Personal email communication, 1 April 2020. Subsequent quotes in this paragraph are also from this message.

4. Frances Barzello, The Artist’s Model (London: Faber and Faber, 1982), 20.

5. Celia Paul, Self-Portrait (London: Jonathan Cape, 2019), 102.

6. Pam Meecham and Julie Sheldon, “The Female Nude as the Site of Modernity,” in Modern Art: A Critical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2000), 91.

Left: Guardian, 2018, walnut and sumi ink on mineral paper, 12 X 9 in.

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7. The foundational texts of this discourse are Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16:3 (Autumn 1975): 6-18, and John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (London: British Broadcasting Corp. and New York: Penguin Books, 1972). Much nuance has subsequently accrued to our understanding of the binary male-female power politics proposed in these early analyses of the gaze.

8. Artist-model relations in the private studio as opposed to the life class of course present a different dynamic, giving rise to popular assumptions, and indeed a whole mythology, surrounding the libertine male artist with his model as sexually accommodating muse and mistress. See Barzello, The Artist’s Model, esp. chapters 5-8.

9. Rosemary Betterton, “How Do Women Look? The Female Nude in the Work of Suzanne Valadon,” Feminist Review 19 (Spring 1985), 10. Valadon (1865-1938), an artist’s model turned professional painter, was an anomaly in her generation in regularly depicting the female nude from a woman’s perspective.

10. The now classic exposure of this dynamic is Carol Duncan’s “Virility and Domination in Early 20th-Century Vanguard Painting,” Artforum 12 (December 1973): 30-39.

11. Barzello, The Artist’s Model, 21.

12. Betterton, “How Do Women Look,” 15, and in the following sentence, 20.

13. For a useful summary of Kristeva’s concept of abjection, see Elizabeth Grosz’s entry in Elizabeth Wright, ed., Feminism and Psychoanalysis, A Critical Dictionary (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1992), 197-98.

14. Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (New York: Pantheon Books, 1956).

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Jane, 2018, walnut, sumi and iridescent ink on mineral paper, 20 X 14 1/2 in.

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Acknowledgments This project grew from a big bubble of collective energy. It began in the summer of 2019 with “Life for Breasts,” a small exhibition of my sumi ink drawings of two-breasted nudes at the Hoffman Art Center in Manzanita on the Oregon Coast. I will always be grateful to the Center’s board president, Mary Roberts, and expert installer, Dave Holt, for making that exhibition a reality. The show was warmly received, and from that experience I decided to use my art to build awareness of the medical technique—cryoablation—which years before had killed my breast cancer and saved my breast from a mastectomy.

Huge inspiration has come from my fellow Patient Pioneers, women who also wanted to treat their breast cancer with cryoablation, even in those early years when it was very hard to challenge medical convention. Hundreds of women have reached out to me since I created KeepingThem.com as a way to promote my book, They’re Mine and I’m Keeping Them (2012), which I co-authored with my cryoablation surgeon and my husband. Coming from every section of the country and across the world, most of these fellow patients were women I would never meet. In my mind, they created a collective female spirit, sharing an appreciation of the body part that represents our femaleness and declaring it worth saving. Their determination has been a driving force for this project, and I dedicate this catalog to them.

It’s rare for someone from the art world to join international medical circles where new treatments and techniques are shared and discussed. I’ve had this opportunity because I accepted an online invitation to accompany a total stranger to China for her cryoablation treatment at Fuda Cancer Hospital in Guangzhou. The head of the hospital heard that I had managed the trip through crowd funding, then learned about my website (as on p. 45), book, and advocacy for cryoablation. He invited me twice to return to Guangzhou as his guest, to speak at International Cancer Forums about my experience with cryoablation and my hope for its future. These visits resulted in many heartfelt connections between people of very different cultures.

We were and are all united in our desire to champion cryoablation as a breast-conserving and immune-stimulating cancer treatment.

Moreover, the Chinese doctors’ and nurses’ generosity in exposing

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me to both ancient and contemporary sumi ink painting has brought me great joy, evident in the body of work presented in this project. I thank them deeply for that, and aspire someday to share this project with them in China.

For her contributions to this catalog, I’m grateful to my colleague Sue Taylor, an art historian, critic, and former Associate Dean in the College of Arts at Portland State University. The equally brilliant Linda Tesner, curator of the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at PSU, benefited the project tremendously with her thoughtful questions and probing insights. Linda’s curiosity and expert perceptions have had a significant influence in shaping my most recent studio efforts.

This publication, sensitively designed by Faith Emerson, was made possible in part by a Career Opportunity Grant from the Oregon Arts Commission and The Ford Family Foundation. I wholeheartedly thank them for their support.

Finally, I want to acknowledge my family—my three children, Sean, Louie, and Emma, and especially my husband, Alex—who have supported and cheered me on both with my art career and with my patient-pioneering efforts to keep my breast and help other women do the same. Bucking an entrenched system is not easy. There have been many dark nights of the soul on this journey. It’s been this close family bunch and the others mentioned above who have all been part of an ever growing collective energy moving us forward, encouraging women to appreciate and keep our breasts.

—Laura Ross-Paul

Self Portrait with Blue Orbs, 2003, charcoal and pastel on paper, 24 X 19 in.

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Biography

Laura Ross-Paul, 2020 (photo by Ken Dixon)

Laura Ross-Paul has been painting professionally for over four decades. During that time she has been represented by nine WestCoast galleries, from Seattle to Laguna Beach, with solo exhibitions at the Portland Art Museum, Oregon; The Colburn Gallery, Colorado College, Colorado; The Art Gym, Portland, Oregon; and important exhibits at the Arnot Museum, Elmira, New York; Palm Springs Art Museum; Seattle Art Museum. Her figurative paintings with mystical and psychologically compelling atmospheres are held in private and public collections throughout the United States.

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Among her many awards, Ross-Paul has received the Bonnie Bronson Visual Arts Fellowship, an Oregon Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship, and the Susan Cooley Gilliom Artist and Teaching Residency in Roseville, California. Her art has been singled out for prizes in regional biennials at the Portland Art Museum, Tacoma Art Museum, and Turtle Bay Museum in Redding, California; featured in the cable TV film Spy (1989); and appears on book covers including fiction by Charles Spaeth (2011) and Barbara Wilson (1993) and poetry by Judith Barrington (2015).

Ross-Paul holds a BFA from Fort Wright College, Spokane, and a BS in Science and an MFA from Portland State University. As an associate professor of painting and drawing, she has fostered the talents of art students at Lewis and Clark College, Oregon College of Art and Craft, Pacific Northwest College of Art, and Portland State. In addition to her contributions as an educator, she is dedicated to community service through her work on numerous boards and committees for arts organizations such as the Regional Arts and Culture Council.

She was a co-founder of and curator for Portland's historic non-profit, the Northwest Artists Workshop, and board member and curator for the historic Portland Center for the Visual Arts.

As an advocate and activist for women with breast cancer seeking the innovative cryoablation treatment, Ross-Paul maintains the Web site KeepingThem.com and has spoken at two international cancer cryoablation conferences in Guangzhou, China. She is co-author with Alex Paul and Peter Littrup, M.D., of They're Mine and I'm Keeping Them, or How Freezing My Breast Saved My Breast (2012) about her experience with breast cancer. A 2016 report on her proposal for what she calls "the early freeze protocol" for breast cancer became the number one most read article on the popular Web site Breast Cancer News.

Ross-Paul is married to author Alex Paul, and they have three children. The couple live in Portland while spending summers at the Oregon Coast. Ross-Paul maintains an active studio practice in both locations. She is currently represented by Brian Marki Fine Art in Palm Springs. You can follow her at lauraross-paul.com and on Instagram at laurarosspaulartist.

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Contributors Sue Taylor received her BA in art history from Roosevelt University and her MA and PhD from the University of Chicago. Formerly critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, curator of prints and drawings at the Milwaukee Art Museum, and adjunct professor at the School of the Art Institute and Northwestern University, she is corresponding editor from Portland for Art in America and professor emerita of art history at Portland State University. Her many publications include Hans Bellmer: The Anatomy of Anxiety (MIT) and Grant Wood’s Secrets (University of Delaware Press).

Linda Tesner is an independent curator and writer living in Portland, Oregon. She has served as the interim director of the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at Portland State University and, from 1998 to 2019, as the director and curator at the Ronna and Eric Hoffman Gallery of Contemporary Art at Lewis & Clark College. She was formerly the assistant director of the Portland Art Museum and the director of the Maryhill Museum of Art in Goldendale, Washington.

She received her BA in art history from the University of Oregon and her MA in the history of art from the Ohio State University.

Right: Jade chops from China (photo: Laura Ross-Paul)

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Left: Red and Black, 2018, walnut and sumi ink on mineral paper, 20 X 14 1/2 in. (photo: Lommasson Pictures, LLC)

lauraross-paul.com cryoblation.com