Manolo for the Big Girl Fashion, Lifestyle, and Humor for the Plus Sized Woman.

Nope. It’s not going to happen.

Appreciate, admire, regard…all that good stuff, but I just don’t like Pierre-August Renoir’s paintings and you can’t make me.

It’s like Jane Austen. I’m not saying they weren’t highly talented individuals very important to the this and that, it’s just that I’d rather go out to an antique store, find a telephone that actually has a cord and then hang myself with it rather than spend an hour subjected to their individual, or indeed collected, works.

BUT, I know how many of you gals liked the big girls in art feature and I’m always glad when I see plus size women painted beautifully in any style so I thought I’d offer you a handful of Renoir’s portraits, mostly from his later years 1914 and on, featuring some of his larger models.

The first portrait is of Austrian actress Tilla Durieux who at the time was married to a prominent art dealer in Paris.

Nice job if you can get it.

The second –and perhaps my favorite– is of his longtime muse Gabrielle Renard, who just so happened to be his childrens’ nanny and his wife Aline’s cousin.

I don’t know whether he had an affair with her, but can you IMAGINE the fights?

“Pierre, WHY is the nanny naked in the studio again? I thought you were doing landscapes this week!”

Next there are several portraits of the mysterious woman labeled just as Andrée. Could it be actress and Impressionists’ darling Ellen Andrée?

It seems a good guess as Renoir definitely painted her often in their younger days, these portraits all show a voluptuous woman with a full, almost carnal, mouth. Other paintings and photographs of the actress show her to have very thin, tight lips.

Ellen Andrée would have been in her 60’s by the time these portraits were painted, not that any portraitist has ever shied away from shaving off a few years –or decades– from his subject.

Finally we’ve got some bathers.

You can actually blame the Hot Latin Boy for this post because it started with this painting.

Back story? Why sure.

The fella and I hadn’t seen each other in donkey’s ears and because your pal Plummy does like to make her entrances –I’m glad you all were sitting down for that shock– when I first appeared to him at Villa Plumcake it was at dusk, wending my way in white dress and gossamer thin shawl through a lovely shadowed garden.

I hadn’t seen him in months and I sure as heck wasn’t going to be stared at in the merciless glare of some fluorescent lights or, you know, the sun.

I plucked a single blossom of night blooming jasmine and stuck it behind my ear as the Pacific swallowed the last breaths of light.

He came up, put my hand on his heart so I could feel it beating (apparently that’s A Thing) and said:

“You look like a sílfide”

For any of you people who are, you know, normal, you would understand immediately that sílfide is a Spanish cognate for sylph.

I didn’t quite understand, so he tried to explain what he meant and somehow I got it into my head that he meant I looked like a selkie.

No, it didn’t occur to me that perhaps a not-widely-traveled Latin boy’s frame of mythological reference might not include little-known Scottish shape-shifting seal maidens, but it honestly seemed more likely than being called a sylph.

Still does. I’d make a damn fine selkie. Plus I could have a seal fur coat without feeling guilty about it and that would be swell because even Cruella DePlumcake can’t swing that coat.

Anyway, sylphs are to my mind quite thin and willowy as are nymphs so I was pleased to see Renoir’s 1919 work The Nymphs (also called The Great Bathers) featuring women who don’t fit the slender sylph model either.

Let me tell you everything I knew about Ensenada before yesterday:

The Road to Ensenada is plenty wide and fast. I knew that because it’s in the lyrics of The Road to Ensenada by Lyle Lovett from the album of the same name which happens to be my favorite Lyle Lovett album when I’m feeling particularly Texan.

The lovestruck young waiter who jumped the gate of Villa Plumcake my first night in Mexico was from Ensenada (fun hint: if you are trying to impress a lady of position and quality, do not offer her hardcore intravenous street drugs on your first outing. Odds are if she won’t drink the tap water she probably won’t be all that enthused at the prospect of sharing a needleful of Mexican methamphetamine)

As it turns out, the road to Ensenada is about six feet wide and built into the side of what can only be described as OHMYGODSLOWDOWNIDONTWANTTODIEONTHISDAMNCLIFF. But it turns out Ensenada is a great harbor town with an excellent fish market and in a strange way I can’t exactly describe, reminds me a lot of Wales.

If I was a good and faithful blogger, dedicated to journalistic excellence and all that other stuff that doesn’t involve sitting in a cantina eating ceviche out of a cracked sundae glass and drinking 50 cent Coronas with a hot Latin boy, I’d have a picture and all the salient details of an enormous sculpture of a big girl’s kelp-covered torso and over which our antediluvian carriage driver waxed poetic while he and his equally aged horse jostled us around in a shiny (wherein shiny = not shiny in any conceivable sense) little surrey with the fringe on the top, doing his best to put an end to the last vestiges of dignity or bladder control I once possessed.

But I think we both know that in the journalistic battle between reportage and cheap beer, cheap beer will always, nay MUST always win, so I don’t have a picture of the big girl, or even really any idea where it was other than “next to that churro place” which I’m not exactly sure narrows it down enough to work my inimitable google-fu.

The driver went on and on and on about that sculpture, it’s new to the city (thus making my internet searching even more fruitless) and he’s clearly very enamored of it. At one point he even made a joke to my companion that I was the model.

My companion, the aforementioned Hot Latin Boy suggested it might be the work of Guillermo Valentin.

I have mixed feeling about artists who portray big women where the bigness is the focus. It smacks of fetishism and being reduced –even if it’s in a positive light– to one simple characteristic: fatness.

That’s not me. I mean, sure I’m fat. If I stay still long enough small Mexican children try to use me for shade, but that’s not ALL I am, it’s not even my most striking characteristic unless you’re looking at me from 50 feet away. I have a hard time feeling good about to being reduced –even symbolically– to a characteristic that frankly is kind of boring to me.

I’ll try to get more information on the sculpture and hash out my own complicated feelings on big girls in art, but for now I’d like to leave you with a few examples of Valentin’s work and ask you how YOU feel about fat women in art. Put it in the comments, gang!