Luscious Lips.

Yesterday I blogged about the near-miss poisoning of my children with the nutritious sea kale that turned out to be poisonous sea poppy.

Today I’m dishing up lips. Lists of lips. My top 3 lips in art. Other body parts will probably follow, so you may want to bookmark me now!

What prompted this swerve from the vegetable? I was going to do great things with carrots today. They started out purple, my daughter told me last night. Well, the blogosphere is a marvellous and accomodating place - actually it would be if I could access my favourites in a zippier timeframe than Technorati or Firefox or the gods responsible seem to give at the moment. My 10 minutes of blog-catch-up time went like this today: 3 minutes reading Scribbit on Motherhood in Alaska. A one minute wait to be told “huh?” by Technorati, telling me a blog I’d read yesterday and favourited doesn’t actually exist. And the other 7 minutes waiting for pages to load.

Ok first vegetables, then indigestion, so working backwards we’ll we get there eventually - lips.

In first place, and these stopped me in my tracks and prompted me to research this initial “best of” survey, is Portrait of a Lady by Rogier van der Weyden, the leading lip artist in the mid-C15th Netherlands as far as I’m concerned. Pursed, plump, perfect.

Albrecht Durer was a fabulous artist, and will definitely feature in other body parts in art blogs; hair, moustaches, and great hats, for starters. Today, I nominate his lips from the famous series of self-portraits completed in his late 20’s.

To finish today’s list, Russian Expressionist painter, Marianne von Werefkin. She’s described in my guide to Great Women Masters of Art, variously as ‘muse’ and as ‘a sort of priestess’. I, for one, want to know more. She painted on cardboard and didn’t date many of her works. This wonderful red-lipped Self-Portrait is from around 1908-1910.

Add your contenders in comments.