The revolution of light

As I drive down interstates, I see computer-imaged skeletal women lounging on billboards. Size 0 models challenge me over my favorite candy bars while I wait in line to buy milk. When a woman walks through streets or strolls on the beach, guys look her up and down, and not in the eyes.

If beauty today is an emaciated or voluptuous object for male pleasure, the problem is in the eye of the beholder. It’s time for a revolution in the eye of the beholders, when every beholder discovers every woman’s beauty. It’s time for a revolution.

Many years ago, I met a revolutionary male feminist. In darkened blue rooms, at first I did not notice the revolution brimming in the depths of his paintings. My art class brought me to this Jans Vermeer exhibit. I was skeptical about mundane domestic scenes of women reading letters, pouring water, or staring into space, yet something began to pulse in my heart: a sense of peace. Time passed in this calm inner world, and was I was lost in a new emotion of inner serenity.

I call that revolutionary, because it was sudden, emotionally charged, and completely unprovoked. It wasn’t like my normal anger produced by raging teenagers screaming for a revolt against authority. It was an epiphany, an implosion of light. From the woman’s deep eyes, a light of Eden shone out. The soft yet radiant truth of paradise began soaking my heart. As if by illumination, I saw every man and every woman were temples for heaven’s beauty.

I call that feminism because “woman” graces almost all of Vermeer’s paintings as the centerpiece. The woman emanates heavenly beauty in the quiet, brown corners of daily life. She is not the virtual supermodel staring with pixel eyes staring into empty space. Vermeer captured her soul on canvas with what he revered most: light. It is said Vermeer believed “light was nature’s paintbrush” (Koning 128). He worked from the inside out, building layers of light strokes to become her eyes, her smile and her aura.

Vermeer was not courting patrons or marketing images for buyers. He was one of the first personal painters using art to express his life philosophy. Vermeer painted from and for one goal: “finding the beauty in the normal” (128). He painted about what he loved most, his wife and daughters. In the daily life with no bright lights and red carpets, he saw beauty in the woman. He viewed women “with tender admiration, almost with adoration” (126).

Vermeer captures the divine within woman. Art critics describe Vermeer’s underlying spirit as “the sacredness of the woman who makes a happy and well-ordered home” (126). Vermeer’s A Lady Weighing Gold, the expecting woman reflects the sacredness of mother. She carries new life within her, and that is a breath of the divine. Where in our city streets, magazine covers can we find smiles like the women in Vermeer’s paintings? They await a new birth full of the mystery of life stirring deep within their womb. God, light itself, stirs within her, creating anew. Where God is, light, life and joy shine forth.


Beholders, it is time for a revolution. Leave aside the internet, fashion, movies, and supermodels, and become pioneers by discovering beauty hidden in your own home, in the women you love. Don’t let wrinkles, size 8s or real-life features deceive you; behind every woman, eyes sparkle with heavenly light and a heart quickens with passionate loves.


Works Cited
Koning, Hans The World of Vermeer: 1632 – 1675. Alexandria: Time-Life Books, 1967