Blue Cohash

Blue Cohosh, 2025, Charcoal and Oil on Arches Oil Paper, 61 x 52 inches

I am excited to share the first completed work in this series, Blue Cohash.

This piece grew from a preparatory sketch that I started in 2022, featuring a standing female figure with revealed skeletal structure and a secondary seated figure presented as sculpture-like form in grass.

What I saw in Vesalius' anatomical drawings at the NYAM was how he depicted the vagina as essentially an inverted penis - showing it as negative space that mirrored male anatomy. This wasn't just because he had limited access to female cadavers for dissection, but because he was working within what I learned is called the "one-sex model."

This theory, which dominated Renaissance medicine and traced back to ancient Greek sources like Galen, held that female reproductive organs were basically the same structures as male ones, just turned inward.

This one-sex model apparently persisted until the 18th century, when it gradually gave way to recognizing fundamental biological differences rather than seeing female anatomy as just a variation of male anatomy. 

It's a perfect example of how scientific observation can still be heavily shaped by prevailing assumptions, even when someone is trying to be empirical and break from tradition.