Diana Vreeland’s pronouncements that “any set of features can support beauty” and that the only real elegance is of the mind (”the rest comes from it”) made simple sense to me as an artist. The self-portraits of my fellow art students, always seeming to focus on the lineaments of struggle and wear in their young faces; the absolute charisma of the women around me in the punk and lesbian communities of the late ’70s where of all moments conventional notions of beauty were demolished; and my childhood among Southern women who blazed with beauty even free of makeup, with brutally chopped hair, beaten and scarred, confirmed it with such naturalness. Of course my studies in various media of the faces of those who fascinated me was further evidence–what to debutante DV may have been calculated defense against her mother’s excoriation of young Diana’s “extreme ugliness” was an inherent truth.