Vermeer's painting, Girl With a Pearl Earring, has played an interesting and ongoing role in my life. When I was about 12 years old, my grandma Daisy (who loved art and was an artist and was one of the kindest and cleverest souls this world has ever known), cut a picture of the painting out a magazine and stuck it in a thrift store gold frame and gave it to me. She said, Rachel this looks just like you.
I remember sitting at the dining room table in my grandparent's house, and staring down at this magazine painting, and it honestly was like looking in a mirror. But some sort of bizarro mirror, where everything I knew to be awful about myself was reflected back as beautiful.
I know this all sounds a little arrogant. I mean, who compares herself to a famously beautiful painting and gets away with it?
Well, maybe I should preface this entire thing by telling you that I was absolutely and completely the embodiment of awkward when I was 12. (Well, at least that's how I felt about myself). I was so incredibly tiny-- short and skinny and pale with eyes that were way too big for the rest of me and that weren't really any color at all. Not brown, not green, definitely not blue.
Anyway, I hung the picture in the bathroom basement, next to my bedroom. And looked at her while I brushed my braces (I mean teeth) every morning. And I would try to decide if I was oddly beautiful (like her), or just plain odd.
Well, I pretty much grew up, and moved away. Then when I was 20-something I was teaching art to these wretchedly over-priveledged children, the Girl reentered my life. One day, this kid (who was 6 and always sort of an outcast to his fellow classmates), was flipping through an art book and happened upon that picture. He brought it up to me and said Why are you in this book?
I kind of just stared at him speechless. I think I sputtered out something about how it wasn't me, it was a famous painting. He looked at me like I was nuts and walked away.
Anyway, what I'm trying to lead up to is that over the weekend I actually got to see this painting in person for the first time in my life. I was down in California visiting my family, and there it was too-- in the de Young Museum in San Francisco.
It's this whole exhibit of Dutch paintings. It's all just gorgeous. But they have her in a room all to her own, and when you see her, down the hall, it's this huge tunnel of darkness with her face just glowing, staring at you from across the view, as if you just called her name to ask when she'd be home, and she turns and looks and almost answers.
I have seen this painting in books, magazines, on busses, posters, mugs, puzzles... I have stared at it in my basement bathroom for years.... but seeing her in person. There are no words.
It almost felt like I was 12 again, seeing her for the first time. Could she really be that strange and beautiful?
I started crying, just a little. The shock of seeing something you've always known, but then realize you're really just seeing it for the first time.
I don't feel like I look much like her anymore. I've sort of grown up and into myself they way we do when we hit 30. Which is not a bad thing. But there is a huge part of me that is so protective and in love with that weird little person I was at 12. Maybe it's because I have a daughter of my own now, and I want so desperately for her to know that she is gorgeous and funny and interesting at every age, even, and especially, when she is 12 and 20 and feeling lost and snowy and startled.
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