“If you must love your neighbor as yourself,

it is at least as fair to love yourself as your neighbor.” Nicolas de Chamfort

In the course of my twenty-some year professional art career I’ve painted many portraits. I often marveled at how lucky I was that I always got to paint such beautiful people. At first I thought maybe it was because I painted mostly rich people (I charge THE EARTH!). They have time and money to fix themselves up, right? But then, I had painted people who wouldn’t have been considered pretty by Hollywood standards, so it wasn’t that. I realized that the process of looking long and gently at the person I was painting allowed me to see, not merely their external loveliness, but their humanness, who they really are inside. Internal and external beauty merged. In fact, schmaltzy as it sounds, I never painted anyone I didn’t end up loving as a person because of this prolonged gazing at their essence. I was fortunate. I got to see their beauty through my artist’s loving eyes instead of my ego’s critical view.

I then got an inspiration…Bingo!... to use the process of seeing and drawing, with myself as model, to help me love my own body and, ultimately, my higher self. Duh. Like most other women in western culture, I have food / weight/ body image issues that I have struggled with since adolescence. I have weighed over 200 pounds and been a model. You get the picture. So, I figured I could heal my poor opinion of my body by drawing and truly seeing myself as I am, not through my judgmental ego’s eyes, but through my artist’s eyes, like Renoir or Degas would. If they could see my body as glorious, then I sure wanted to see it that way too. It worked very well.

I also realized that any woman could easily learn to see and love her body as that of the quintessential woman, Venus. Maybe even one of those sensuous primitive fertility goddesses of the early religions. So, I wrote this simple book to help women to see themselves with love like Renoir would. I really think he paints through God’s eyes.