Wingate Paine — Theatre of the Sublime

Letter to a Friend about Girls

by Philip Larkin

After comparing lives with you for years

I see how I’ve been losing: all the while

I’ve met a different gauge of girl from yours.

Grant that, and all the rest makes sense as well:

My mortification at your pushovers,

Your mystification at my fecklessness—

Everything proves we play in separate leagues.

Before, I couldn’t credit your intrigues

Because I thought all girls the same, but yes,

You bag real birds, though they’re from alien covers.

Now I believe your staggering skirmishes

In train, tutorial and telephone booth,

The wife whose husband watched away matches

While she behaved so badly in a bath,

And all the rest who beckon from that world

Described on Sundays only, where to want

Is straightway to be wanted, seek to find,

And no one gets upset or seems to mind

At what you say to them, or what you don’t:

A world where all the nonsense is annulled,

And beauty is accepted slang for yes.

But equally, haven’t you noticed mine?

They have their world, not much compared with yours,

But where they work, and age, and put off men

By being unattractive, or too shy,

Or having morals—anyhow, none give in:

Some of them go quite rigid with disgust

At anything but marriage: that’s all lust

And so not worth considering; they begin

Fetching your hat, so that you have to lie

Till everything’s confused: you mine away

For months, both of you, till the collapse comes

Into remorse, tears, and wondering why

You ever start such boring barren games

—But there, don’t mind my saeva indignatio:

I’m happier now I’ve got things clear, although

It’s strange we never meet each other’s sort:

There should be equal chances, I’d’ve thought.

Must finish now. One day perhaps I’ll know

What makes you be so lucky in your ratio

—One of those ‘more things’, could it be? Horatio.

Text by Philip Larkin and photography by Wingate Paine.

I was born in Los Angeles during 1966. It was this time photographer Wingate Paine published his boudoir book of muses 'Mirror of Venus.' It's been noted that Paine burned and destroyed all the negatives after the publication. It has also been said that the models were all friends and lovers.

I held little charm with my biological parents at this time, two mythological persons I call the Bios. You see, after three months with me they left me with the nuns where I was quickly claimed by a lovely Dutch couple who showed me the world so that the Bios could go on with their life. All that's known of them barely fill page in a profile of feedings and sleep habits. It's been written that he was a poet and she a clerk. He was dark and small in stature. She was tall with long red hair and big blue eyes. So why do I think of the Bios at a time like this? I'll get to that.

Almost forty three years later Wingate Paine's images of muses were celebrated once again in a lovely little vintage clothing store called Resurrection on Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood last month. Designs by Katy Rodriguez, walls adorn by the women of Wingate Paine. The images captured theses beauties in intimate moments that give you that feeling of a time filled with morning luminosity after the surrender when the mood is light and warm. A time between the purity of the 1950's and the sexual revolution of the 1960's. Rodriguez designed a collection inspired by this celebration of female openness and femininity and is quoted in saying, " The book is “fashion without clothes,” whose designs have a lot of Paine’s girlishness to them." The collection was donated from private collectors. The exhibit ran from May 21 to June 15 this year under the title "Venus Revisited."

Viewing and admiring the frivolity of these moments of women playfully running nude on the beach, laughing in the bath and posing within clean white sheets I began to speculate the relationship of the Bios. Was she the muse of his creativity? Did he destroy the remnants of words as he blatantly threw me away? Did she in fact survive the artist muse relationship? My entire existence in fact based on question and query, never to be answered. However, not worth tormenting oneself. I now posses a sense of romanticism when it comes to the Bios. Maybe he wrote of a smile and pleasant afternoon that seized him with a passion to burn all that was lost.

"Wingate Paine, 1915 – 1987, was a member of a Mayflower New England family with ties to law, banking and the ministry. He broke from those traditions and became a Marine captain, connoisseur of French wine, devotee of Hatha-Yoga and finally a gifted photographer and filmmaker. Described as his “visual valentine to feminine beauty,” Paine’s series of female nudes were published in his 1967 book Mirror of Venus. This 1960s classic was printed in ten editions and features text written by Federico Fellini and Françoise Sagan. Paine later abandoned photography for sculpture. Mirror of Venus represents the culmination of his photographic career."

Written for Imeem August 23, 2009.
Photography by Wingate Paine.