“It’s short fast and hard, you know?” Lani Beloso says about her period. She’s a gorgeous 42-year-old with a license in nuclear medicine and a condition called menorrhagia: her periods are 3x heavier than normal, and horribly painful.
“One day,” she says, “I thought: I’m gonna sit over something and I’m going to see exactly how much comes out of me-because I thought it was a gallon. I thought I was bleeding to death every month. I wanted to actually see the amount…I’m just going to sit over great a canvas and make a painting out of it while I’m at it.”
That was the beginning of “The Period Piece,” a project in which Beloso, already a painter/photographer, created 13 canvases with her own menstrual blood, representing a year’s worth of cycles. She wasn’t making a statement-she was just wanted to make the pain worth something.
“It was cathartic and made me not hate that time of the month so much anymore,” Beloso says, but she also finds it beautiful and funny. “I don’t plan on having children, I’m not using my uterus. I just wanted to take it out and throw it in the garbage can.” But the project did make the intense, painful periods useful to her and beautiful and inspiring for others. (She did bring that “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade” bromide to a whole new level).
Beloso actually did just stay there and bleed on a canvas for the first painting, but for the others she collected her blood and then applied it. She’d “paint the canvas, let it dry, then paint the blood on, pour it, or whatever I was doing and then cover it in resin, so it’s not a biohazard or anything.”
From up close, Beloso explains, the resin seal makes it looks like the blood is “suspended” in the resin, which doesn’t mix with it, but stays separate, “like oil and water.” Sometimes the drying process or temperature the blood was stored at or at what point the resin was applied caused changes in the blood color, from red to a dark maroon. But it’s all her.
Menstrual art is certainly not common but there are other women who do it, like Vanessa Tiegs, who created a series of paintings called “Menstrala.” Sarasota, Florida, artist Charon Luebbers created a 6’x6’x5′ “Menstrual Hut” in 1996 to illustrate the isolating experience of menstruation.