Not sure if this is quite on topic, but I didn't see any boards dealing with society and being large.

I was looking through this month's Architectural Digest magazine, and on page 64 (for those of you who have it and want to see), one of their picks for the top 100 designers has decorated a room with a stone sculpture of a nude fat woman on the coffee table.

I don't normally like nude sculptures, and I'd never think a fat nude could be art. But this one is art. In the photo, she's seen from the back (behind is in your face). She's sort of bending to the side, with her long hair streaming out. What makes it art for me is that the curve of her body, of the leaning, is actually just a very nice line.

I wouldn't say the fat is beautiful, but the piece is beautiful, and it's just nice to see something like that.

Anyway, no point to this, just wanted to throw it out there for any discussion.

Ok Siena ~ I'll Discuss, I Wouldn't Say Fat Is Beautiful Either...however...beautiful Women (especially 3fc Ones!!) Come In All Different Sizes And Shapes.

That Being Said...unhealthy Fat Is Darn Ugly!!!

There used to be a lot of "fat" art. Back when the womanly form was considered more beautiful the more womanly it was. Stone age people REVERED the maternal figure. (google Venus of Willendorf) And heck, nobody lived that long then anyway, so diabetes and heart disease were pretty irrelevant.

And Rubens painted fat women (hence the term rubenesque for a very curvy woman). Some of his subject had teeny eeny waists from years of wearing corsets but big butts and thighs. (GAH sudden image of a painter in renaissance garb rapping to "Baby got back"). Hmm, cant remember which painting I was thinking of because none of them have teeny waists, even his picture of Venus - the goddess of beauty and love - is no small fry.

There is a difference between a normal body and an obese body. One of my teachers painted a lovely nude of his wife while pregnant, and with their baby... they had them displayed in their house. I thought they were tasteful and beautiful...

i think if more people aimed for a rubenesque figure instead of a Twiggy figure we'd all be a lot happier and easier on ourselves...

Fat nudes have been a basis for art for hundreds... well, thousands of years. From ancient fertility goddesses to the PreRaphealites and on. Go to a general art site and take a gander. Waterhouse, Rubens, Rossinni, Cezanne to start used mainly larger women in their studies. But as a whole, pre-modern art tends to favor larger nudes. Far more sensual than modern sharply cut nude lines in my opinion.

We've always been beautiful, hon. I think nowadays we're just realizing it's not as healthy.

Standards of beauty vary across time, culture, and individuals. There is nothing sacreligious about the concept of fat being beautiful. Health and beauty do not always correlate. The heroine-waif-starvation chic of the runway model is no more healthy than Venus of Willendorf obesity.

My husband says I am beautiful, and he doesn't only mean it in a "spiritual" sense. I think he's pretty sexy himself, though we both are obese. We both need to lose weight for health reasons, but we don't have to feel or consider the other ugly in order to do it.

The general impression of beauty has always been linked somewhat to the economy. Back in the days when voluptuous women were the primary subjects in art, generally, only the affluent could afford to eat enough to get that way. Usually the servant girls and other members of the lower classes were skinny.

These days, it's so easy to be on the hefty side, so we (as a society) admire people with the ability to be slim when there is such an abundance of food. If a famine were to break out in the U.S. and Europe, we would probably see a gradual shift back to finding women with fuller figures as being more desirable than the stick thin girls we have in magazines and on runways now.

My absolute favorite painting, 'An Allegory of Venus and Cupid' by Bronzino depicts Venus in all her womanly glory. She is not fat, but she is plump, full, and strong. Over the years, I've seen how my body is similar in ways to Venus' body in the painting, but I still feel that need/desire to be thinner. It's sort of strange how I can appreciate how beautiful full figured women are in art, but when it comes to my own body, it's so much harder. If this were the 1500's, maybe I'd feel differently...

http://www.artrenewal.org/index.html

As noted above, women of all shapes and sizes are found in art. Check out the website above for some gorgeous classical paintings of women from thick to thin (And if you like one, the large images they provide make great wall paper!)

If only we could get the media to see what the artists do...