Reflecting On Loneliness It was in the news today- again- science has proven that loneliness kills. I suspect that this was a surprise to no one. And the lonely people flooding Facebook posted it with comments that reflected nothing less than accusatory glee. There was a gloating surrounding the story, a kind of pathetic, desperate jabbing meant to declare with neon lights the truth found in the findings. People are lonely, the lonely shouted, and it’s all your fault because people like you just don’t give a shit. No one got lonely from loving too much, someone commented after the story, and I felt the cold sea that engulfed him, keeping him apart from the strangers who didn’t know he was alive. I felt an icy flash of that dark place he was writing from and my heart broke for him. But loneliness has a different face for everyone, and where I stand, it looks an awful lot like love. Speak for yourself, I thought, with sorrow that is usually more contained. Loving too much is exactly what has made me lonely. Another person commented on science by citing facts that were really pure speculation. Women are lonelier than men, they said, and black people are lonelier than white people. Poor people are lonelier than rich people, etc. This was in stark contrast to another posting that knowingly expounded on the happiness of poor tribes in Africa and destitute families in Cuba and Mexico. When you have nothing, you realize what you have, the person said, and those of us steeped in privilege and consumerism in white North America cannot possibly comprehend community and its value. Cubans know the meaning of family. I don’t know. I love living alone. Sometimes I am heading home from a grueling social soiree and panic, thinking, what if I had a roommate or kids and wouldn’t find solitude when my door shut on the world? I often quip that when I find the man of my dreams, he will live next door, even if we are married. I’m not the only one who finds overcrowding annihilating. But apparently, say the wise men of science, flying solo is as deadly as being fat or smoking, and it causes heart disease, immune deficiency, high blood pressure, hormone disorders, and dementia. It was a bit of caustic serendipity, perhaps, that before logging online this morning to find this story I waited for the coffee to brew in a quiet automat painted by Edward Hopper. Most mornings, I open one of my art books at random and contemplate a painting in those few minutes before the day begins. Today’s page turned out to be a familiar and favourite work by an artist dogged by interpretations of isolation and desolation. Hopper was a taciturn and ornery fellow but he resisted our translations of his work, however entrenched they have become. Hopper’s art most famous work, Nighthawks, is literally the poster child representing lonely. A few stragglers sit in a night café or bar, staring into the stillness. We can barely abide their lack of conversation or their late night solitude and have created a persistent mythology about the painting. Automat, 1927, features a young woman seated at a round table our side of a huge dark window. Like most of Hopper’s works, it is interpreted as a lament to humanity’s terrible disconnection. A typical conclusion is this one, from an anonymous writer online. “The woman looks self-conscious and slightly afraid, unused to being alone in a public place. … She unwittingly invites the viewer to imagine stories for her, stories of betrayal or loss. … Hopper does not tell a story but paints a moment, a moment that includes loneliness, isolation, and a spell of the dark…The viewer looks at this and immediately feel her isolation and loneliness as if it were his own.” When I was a teenage outcast, I was so lonely that I couldn’t comprehend how much worse my condition could and would become. And I loved this painting. But it wasn’t because I felt the subject’s loneliness so deeply. It was envy that I felt. I was madly jealous of what she had. There was a casual resignation in her expression. In Hopper’s picture, I didn’t feel the ongoing chaotic desperation that was all I knew. I didn’t read into this work the cues of hopeless isolation I was supposed to see. I felt instead someone else’s Zen, before I had even heard of the concept, a calm from the storm of others. I constructed a whole life for this character, the woman with the fine calves and the beautiful cloche, whom I named Jane. She was an artist. She lived with her father, and her mother had passed away. She was Catholic, but only at weddings and funerals and maybe Easter. She was a young woman who had experienced tragic and epic romance. She was also ordinary, a woman patiently waiting out the day with a cup of coffee. My imagination imbued her story with a poignant poetry. I thought that if I could find hats like hers and the peace of mind to sit so solemnly alone, I would always find my way. By the time the coffee maker breathed its contented and finished hiss, I was long transported into Edward Hopper’s painted café. I had already lamented the thick calves and crows feet of middle age that wedged twenty years between me and the last time I’d seriously searched this artwork. And I’d already been struck by thoughts that were bizarrely protective of the young woman’s solitude. I had woken alone and I would spend the day working, alone. Even so, I wanted to hog the woman’s solitude like a cache of diamonds. Then I logged into my morning, Stevia and cream tempering the acrid and acid Maxwell house bargain canister. Lonely! Lonely! screamed the news. You’re dying of loneliness! Simon says, science says. Perhaps what is loneliest for the introvert, who now has a name and a category from which to perch piously, is not being lonely. It’s practically a sin. Who in their right mind would envy, over Christmas, those with no family rigmarole to attend? Who but the most selfish and miserly among us would prefer to wander aimlessly by themselves on Saturday night, when a gaggle of girlfriends was cheering and beering together in the local watering hole? We are monsters, refusing the calls of people who love us and want to chitchat until the cows come home. Inane banter does nothing to assuage the hollows, but long hours walking solo restores our souls. How do you explain that you need more “me time” to people who would give anything for more anybody-else time? My extroverted sister makes me dizzy, and the kindness of strangers who reach out into the deserted geography where my mind resides is one I can’t always repay. My work, too, demands so much interaction that I have to steel myself to keep it together. Yes, writing and working in the studio are done in long stretches of gorgeous solitude. But the other side of my job is about attending art openings, mine and yours, meeting and greeting and mingling and jingling. In occasional doses, the jazz and white wine and meet and greet of this scene is nice work, if you can get it, and a chance for me to wear my red lipstick for someone other than my cats. But too much of this on my calendar, I begin to defragment and come apart at the seams. Perhaps it is true that introverts are insensitive, self-centered clods who don’t give a rat’s ass about the brotherhood of man. But I suspect something else is going on for those of us who take our company in smaller doses. We may be more sensitive. I am so sensitive to the emotions of others that I can hardly take reign of my own. Being highly empathic is, indeed, a trait that fuels the work of many artists and writers. We must constantly create because we are always “processing.” Far from self-indulgent, we are stuck feeling and feeling and moving through everyone else’s ups and downs as well as our own. It’s a heavy burden to carry. Following this logic, perhaps it is the “people persons” who need constant assurance of their place at the table, continual affection even if it’s from strangers, which makes it superficial even if it feels good. Maybe it’s these who are more selfish then, than us loners. We don’t need to scoop up a constant fill of emotions from others to feel good, to validate ourselves. Maybe the social butterfly is not the saint with endless love to give, but the piranha, with endless love to take. Or maybe we are all just wired differently and need to stop pointing fingers at each other every time an article is posted on social media. I always try to explain that I need a lot of “down time” in order to fuel up for the big gusts of loving everyone, and I take great cares to make sure that the people I love know my love is not a mild, airy, flaky kind of thing but something profound and loyal. It is not wasted on every Tom, Dick and Harry but reserved for the ones who grow with me and show deep acceptance and care. The biggest mistakes I’ve made in my life were the ones I spent distracted by and focused on emergencies of urgency for strangers and relatives alike, while ignoring the lovely, ordinary people in my life who loved me. My brazen errors of attention robbed those who were not fleeting stars on my path, but fellow travelers for the long haul. Still, I can’t help but resent the archaic views that the individual is to blame and the collective overrides the ultimate minority, the self. It is our unique individual identity that separates us from the animal kingdom, where the most personality filled cat or dog or cockatiel will never look into the mirror and say, who am I? When will I die? Why did this poem make me cry? Why do I prefer golf over ballet? Should I take up Buddhism? Pyschology keeps harping over the joys of any old relationship, and people who prefer to live alone or love alone are made to feel they are missing something, that they are decrepit, lacking, maladjusted, dangerous, or sick. It takes a village and such clichés are considered superior ideations, and retreat is antisocial and ill. But what of those of us who find the most healing in backing away? Are we always and forever retrogrades? More, are our intense social unions nullified by the lack of intrinsic need for constant companionships? Some of us get very tired of the pathologizing. We don’t feel incomplete. I have made peace with the fact that most people want to be paired up, or feel that a night without someone snoring and kicking next to them is an empty one. But I know that countless others aren’t lying when they find true fulfillment and relief in their own rhythm. How we survived the days of the cave, and the days of four generations in one kitchen all at once, I cannot guess. Perhaps I am grossly selfish, but the overwhelm of a big family would tip my mental health balance towards suicide, and quickly. It is not company that assuages these impulses for me: my lifelong struggle with bipolar disorder is always exacerbated by over-socializing and soothed by quiet time far away from the madding crowds. The impulse of j’accuse is universal, though, so when some feel obligated to point at another’s paucity of love and empathy as a cause of the world’s loneliness, it’s as natural as breathing. If only lonely had an easy solution. I was so much lonelier before I recognized my introversion. I often try to explain to others that I’m never bored when I’m alone but quickly bored if I stay too long at parties. We all have our limits and they are different. Without a few days of solo bliss I can hardly handle other hearts. After holidays with family I cherish, I need time off and working is like the holiday. But I do start to feel unloved after a week or so goes by without some solid meeting of the minds and souls of those close to me. Still, I feel most lonely when tossed into buzzing social milieus with people I barely know, not when I’m by myself. Small gatherings of a handful of good friends somewhere with wine and the possibility of hearing each other speak are golden. Some people need more, some a lot more. A very few people need much less, and more, or even any, is painful for them. I’m not one of these, but I do understand that hermits aren’t necessarily damaged. They are avoiding damage. Extremely solitary people have long had cures of companionship thrust at them by the well-meaning but clueless, and doctors used to force autistic children into hugging and false bonding. But it is the individual who should set the pace of how much company and touch he or she needs Scientists and other social philosophers will always come up with their own prescriptions of what is normal and healthy. I can only go with what works in my own life. I have felt such intense pain in my lifetime, I sometimes don’t know how I still stand. I do not say this to separate myself from others, but rather to glue. We all feel pain. Mine is mine, a private affair, and yours is yours, and if there is something I can do, I will. But I don’t presume that there is, and I’m certainly not vain enough to think I can make it better just by being around. In my book, loving someone doesn’t mean hogging all their space and time in the name of “giving.” “Being there” doesn’t mean literally being here, at least not for me. I am moved when someone wants to “be there” for me, and knows they don’t have to “be here” to “be there.” The ultimate irony, perhaps, of loneliness, is that no one can fix it. It’s not so easy as stopping for a moment to consider the homeless or broken. It’s not about finding a party for a socialite or a friend for a widow. Even the most extroverted, social animals among us cannot find solace in a crowd after a death or separation. That demon of isolation and grief comes at us after loss, even when we have other magnificent offers. How many times have we squandered affection on a rejecter when we have had a thousand hands extended? The loneliest times of my own life could not be salved by anyone. When I weep, drunk and alone, it is nothing you can fix with all the love in the world. I want J. back, and I want my mother, and they aren’t there, and nothing else will do. I would also extend that loneliness is an exquisite and important rite of passage. Like my romanticizing of the cloche lady in the Hopper, abandonment is a state of mind that we need to address and come to terms with. The theme in pop and country songs about being left lonely, left behind, left out, are crucial and integral to our personal evolution. In high school, I didn’t know that every high school kid was lonely. Yes, as a bullied kid, I was probably more lonely than some. But as a kid who had found a way into the realm of imagination and creativity, I was probably well ahead of the rest in finding sanctuary. Just as today’s studies tell us about lonely science, we’ve known for some time that churchgoers and other spiritually grounded folks have better mental health. This is attributed to more connectivity. But that hive of community is one of the reasons I’ve avoided my spiritual matters in public life. I prefer to read poetry and the bible at home, and I commune with theologians and writers this way. I don’t want to see a bunch of people on Sunday mornings! I feel fragile and invaded after good-intentioned folks at my sister’s church fall over the pews to shake my hand and say “nice to see you come out” when they don’t know anything about me. Still, study after study after study has confirmed that religion is apparently good for your health and the reason is connection to a community. Here, ever contrarian, I wonder. Is it really the connection to other lost and seeking humans over triangle tuna sandwiches that makes the difference- or is it connection to God? The famous David Caspar Friedrich painting about the monk on the shore comes up in various Google searches for loneliness- self-portrait, lonely monk, desolate, empty. But like Jane waiting for no one in the automat, I see the work as a triumph. The monk is solitary against the wild, but he is intimately connected with the cosmos. I never see this painting as a lonely one. I’m not so sure the artist did, either. Whether God is true or false, it’s scientific to say believers are ahead of the game. The interpreters of science leap in and conclude it’s the connection to community. Some of the first studies in sociology showed that active goers to synagogue and church committed suicide the least, and their lack of loneliness was cited as the reason. Perhaps many find joy through the hubbub of hellos, but I grow furious when someone who doesn’t know me and doesn’t really give a damn asks how I am and how my holiday was. It’s okay to just exist side by side and not pretend. I wonder if it’s not the social aspect but the sense of meaning that gives the religious their edge. Maybe it’s the perception of relationship to God, not to everyone else. Maybe it’s the feeling that it’s not all futile. After all, people who go to casinos and pubs a lot are also around a lot of people, and this connection is not heralded as a lifesaver. Don’t get me wrong. I understand that Christ said, Love thy neighbour. And I am not suggesting we should harbour rancour to others. I am not advocating cruelty, and I am not saying we should always leave everyone alone. I am not saying everyone has my kind of loneliness, or lack thereof, or any of the other things some will try to read into my words. I am only saying that superficial empathy and companionship are quick fixes that don’t hold for many of us. I am only saying that constantly giving love to those who haven’t earned it has been the undoing of many souls. I am only saying that for some, being around people does not cure their loneliness but creates it. My most dark, profound, naked, terrible, disappointed moments are with other people. In all the days that I kept hoping you would fix it, I remained impotent. When I stopped asking you to love me beyond what you could and did, when I stopped asking the dead to rise, the unable to reign, I found a fragile peace. When I realized that fewer and deeper friendships with those whose trust I earned and mine theirs, I stopped giving myself away so easily. When I realized that you don’t go to church or to art receptions or to school to be seen or to make idle chit chat, but to nourish the soul with connection to something more important than superficial bonds, I started to find what I was looking for. Since I have learned to sit in cafes by myself just like Jane and say no to group excursions to movies and go by myself, since I have said no to roommates and no to relationships with men just for their own sake and no to going out on Friday nights unless I want to, I have been far less lonely. Not forcing myself to hold up the social above all else has actually made me far more generous to the needs of others. Not spending time on people just because I’m supposed to has freed me to spend more time with the people I care about most and grow closer to my family, to give what I should to my closest friends, instead of spreading myself thin in the lunch room or on the subway. I am able to truly enjoy meeting people and being with them since I found the peace of mind to be alone when I need to be. Far be it for me to question scientists and doctors and the New York Times. But I think Thomas Moore nailed it in his wonderful book Soul Mates. “…We may think we're lonely because we have no friends,” he writes, “when the fact is we have no relationship to ourselves.” Lorette C. Luzajic Lorette C. Luzajic is an artist and writer living in Toronto, Canada. She writes about art, and makes multilayered collage paintings that incorporate text and literary themes. She has published hundreds of poems, short stories, and creative essays. Visit her at www.mixedupmedia.ca.
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The Art Project by Sherod Santos Poet, essayist and translator, Sherod Santos is the author of six books of poetry, a book of translations, Greek Lyric Poetry: A New Translation, and a book of essays, A Poetry of Two Minds. Mr. Santos has received an Award for Literary Excellence from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as grants from Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Chicago.
Umbrellas
On the day I visit the gallery, it is raining. Manchester, famous for rain, revolution, and football, lives up to its reputation, and Mosely Street in March—seen from the third storey—glistens with passers-by holding dark umbrellas aloft. Brett, Dorothy (1883-1977), hanging here on the white wall of the gallery, painted umbrellas in bright colours, parasols, really, for the sun. She does not call them parasols. Her bleak pessimism announces that it will surely rain soon. Curved backs recline. Lytton Strachey, knees crossed under a yellow umbrella, book falling limply from his hand. Ottoline Morrell, on whom Dorothy has a crush, resplendent in pink silk, folding her hands in her lap beneath a sheath of green. Behind her, perhaps, Virginia, who was not yet Woolf, and Leonard, curled into blue and pink umbrellas, oblivious to the party, the absence of Vita not yet felt. No sign of Lawrence here. The slight man paying court to Ottoline is too tall, too dark, too earnest to be Lawrence. Lawrence came later, cast Ottoline into controversy, drew Dorothy into his orbit. She followed him to Rananim—Dorothy, that is—by boat, leaving behind the grey March drizzle. In the heat of a parched New Mexico she put down roots, seeing no need now to paint umbrellas. On the day I visit the gallery, I do not have an umbrella. I take shelter under Dorothy’s, spending long moments soaking in the warm light. Later, in the gallery gift shop, I buy a postcard of her umbrellas, slip it between the pages of a book I am reading, forget it is there. I’ll find it later still, when I have travelled above the clouds to leave behind the grey March drizzle, when I, too, have put down roots in American soil. Unlike Dorothy, I still need an umbrella. I keep hers in a small frame on my sunny kitchen wall, in case it rains. Catherine A. Brereton Catherine A. Brereton is from England, but moved to America in 2008, where she is now an MFA candidate at the University of Kentucky. Her essay, "Trance," published by SLICE magazine, was selected by Ariel Levy and Robert Atwan as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays, 2015. She is the 2015 winner of theFlounce’s Nonfiction Writer of the Year award. Her more recent work can be found in Crack the Spine, The Rain, Party, and Disaster Society, The Watershed Review, The Indianola Review, Literary Orphans, and The Spectacle, and is forthcoming in GTK Creative Journal, and Burning Down the House anthology. Catherine is the current Editor-in-Chief of Limestone, the University of Kentucky's literary journal. She lives in Lexington with her wife and their teenage daughters, and can be found online at catherinebrereton.com. Fifty Shades of Grey: the Evocative Silence of Vilhelm Hammershoi
Vilhelm Hammershoi’s curiously withdrawn paintings of muted, spare interiors and a faceless woman in black are most often compared to Jan Vermeer and Edward Hopper. I see the chain of continuity, but Vilhelm’s works also contain an understated current of erotic poetry. There is softness in the hard angles, and a sense of eavesdropping, of happening on a window and looking into someone’s private world. These are not mere depictions of blank walls and pianos and housewives reading letters. They are haunted, too. The grey Dane was a reclusive, elusive man whose art garnered modest recognition in his lifetime. But after his death to cancer, just shy of a century ago, he faded into relative obscurity. There was an important retrospective at the Musee D’Orsay in 1998, and a well-received exhibition at the Met in 2001. Yet Hammershoi remains a cult figure. He is revered by a ragtag assortment of followers intrigued by the unsettling beauty of his images. The works fetch sizeable sums from museums at auction. But, perhaps as he would have wished, he has never found the limelight. By the few accounts we have, we understand Hammershoi was a reticent man, preferring solitude or quiet company. He was described as “taciturn” and shy. He spoke softly, and was painfully sensitive. He had his own kind of closeness with a chosen few, especially his wife Ida, subject of most of his portraits. His paintings reflected the quietude he sought. “Hammershoi’s ‘reality’ is a room devoid of people,” wrote Dr. Kasper Monrad, chief curator at the National Gallery of Denmark. The artist’s legacy was bolstered by a chance encounter with Monty Python’s Michael Palin, who found himself enchanted by the uncluttered, desaturated interiors and the mysterious figure whose back is always turned. Palin said the artist’s grey and sepia paintings stood out from others, “like undertakers at a carnival. These…sparsely furnished rooms, almost stripped of colour, conveying a powerful sense of stillness and silence…there was something about the work that drew me like a magnet. Something beyond appreciation of technique or decorative effect, something deeper and more compulsive, taking me in a direction I'd never been before.” Palin followed his muse to Copenhagen and made a documentary film, thereby dusting off the bygone relic and reviving Vilhelm to a brief vogue. Besides Jan Vermeer and Hopper, there is little to compare to Hammershoi’s work. Alex Colville and Hopper share something of their detachment. They too convey ordinary life scenes with a kind of eeriness that is difficult to pin down. Magritte sometimes used a similar labyrinth of doors and windows to create mystery. And the tonalist artists of Hammershoi’s time certainly influenced his palette with their ranging greys. We know he liked Whistler, for example, because he painted his own version of Arrangement in Grey and Black (Whistler’s Mother). Vermeer’s influence is obvious in Vilhelm’s interior subjects, light, and perspective. Indeed, after the 1998 retrospective, he was dubbed, “the Danish Vermeer.” But Hammershoi distinguished himself from both his teachers and his heirs by stripping colour and detail utterly from his scenes. With all distractions gutted from the narrative, we find in the starkness a stunning, subtle subtext of sensuality. What has been removed, what goes unsaid, what lies beneath, is the real story in these paintings. The shifting light through the window, the people frozen in time. How we are standing at the edge of the painting, looking in, like the artist himself. Hammershoi’s rooms are pared down, and his subjects are oddly unadorned, placing them in a kind of still-life twilight zone. But their quality of isolation does not beg for change. The paintings are evocative vignettes, haikus of sorts to the beauty of the ordinary. One gets the sense that much more would shatter this fragile shelter. He is already overwhelmed. “Each of them looks like the sad home of a recently bereaved widower, whose place has been forcibly tidied up by a cold, hard, bureaucratic, social worker,” writes Christie Davies, who does not see what I see. She chides the artist for having “locked himself into his glum apartment in Copenhagen with his dull…wife and produced dull, glum interiors which he sold to his dentist.” But I think that Vilhelm understands that he has all he needs, even if he seldom leaves his house. Christie minces no words in expressing her repugnance towards the “bleak houses” and bare walls and the “total absence of cheerful, welcoming clutter.” But I find each quiet conundrum to be like the moment of a sharp intake of breath. In their very stillness one can hear the heart beating wildly. Christie finds the Danes’ unusual claim to fame as top producers of hard-core pornography unsurprising in light of such art history. “Perhaps it is necessary to arouse them from their dreadful ennui…Better they add lithium, for their souls are eaten away by spiritual caries…We can see from Hammershoi's work that the Danish sky is an endless undifferentiated grey and there are no hills.” Perhaps. Vilhelm and his wife really did live in the kind of minimalism he portrays, with walls and furniture they painted white themselves. We are painfully intimate to the artist’s awkward reservation. There is the sense of existing apart from the routine clatter and upheaval of life. Indeed, This indicates to me someone who was extremely sensitive and easily overwhelmed. Many said the painter had neurasthenia. This was a popular but vague diagnosis in his time, pointing to a variety of nervous conditions from dyspepsia to chronic fatigue to depression. But I feel there is an attentiveness to beauty, even if it is redefined by minimalism. There is a sense of awe rather than alienation. There is a reverence towards mystery. It’s as if Hammershoi found solace, and soul, in his unique relationship to the world and to Ida. To some degree, he understood or made peace with his own limitations, and he accepted those of his wife. Maybe Vilhelm did not require bright colours and rolling hills for a deeply sensual experience of life. In my study of art, I return time and time again to the writings of Thomas Moore. Moore writes more about music, psychology, God, and even golf than he writes about art, but as an especially gifted observer, he shows me how to see. A recurring theme throughout his work is that real depth of experience comes from entering fully into life’s mysteries, including the painful ones. Instead of viewing every uncertainty, imperfection, quirk, or heartbreak as a pathology that needs to be tidied up and fixed, we can open ourselves to what it reveals about our soul. It’s not that we should never strive for better; rather, Moore acknowledges that both the hands we are dealt and the choices we make lead us into a range of encounters that deepen our very humanity. My sexy has been filled with tumultuous highs and nightmare fall outs, and looks nothing like the serene and vacant world of the Hammershois. Its excesses and lackings have been messy and fraught with dramatics, inconsistent and embarrassing. “Colourful” is a fitting, if polite, description. In contrast, what we can see of Hammershoi’s is reserved, restrained, almost elegant, in fifty shades of grey. So very, very naked. Art allows us to conjure the lives of others. The fact of fiction gives us access to other realities. In speculating on the private world that Hammershoi has revealed publicly through his art, I can’t help but thinking about Moore’s insights on love and sexuality in his books Soul Mates and The Soul of Sex. The paradox of finding such intense sensuality in the chaste, introverted renderings of this painter makes sense through Moore’s lense. That Vilhelm paints interiors with such sensuousness is even more interesting in light of Moore’s observation that, “The word ‘intimacy’ means ‘profoundly interior.’ It comes from the superlative form of the Latin word ‘inter,’ meaning ‘within.’ It could be translated… ‘most within.’ In our intimate relationships, the ‘most within’ dimensions of ourselves and the other are engaged.’ There is a heartbreaking dispassion in Vilhelm’s artworks, rendered in the almost obsessive neutrality of his depictions. Yet the artist remains focused on his wife, allowing all of us to share his preoccupation. His idea of beauty is unadorned, to be certain, but there’s a sense of complete surrender to the terms of the relationship. There’s a tenderness sometimes absent in more raucous, racy, noisy ways of desire. There is an exquisite intimacy within the seeming aloofness. Look at the rapt attention he pays to the naked curve of her slender neck. The few mussed tendrils against the bare skin are almost a fixation. Ida is a geisha. The nape, which the Japanese once saw as a woman’s most erotic aspect, is vulnerable and exposed. Whatever the dynamics of their marriage, there is an understanding between them. There is no tension in the air, and the melancholy is balanced by some kind of reverence. “It isn’t easy to expose your soul to another, to risk such vulnerability, hoping that the other person will be able to tolerate your own irrationality,” Moore continues. “It may also be difficult…to be receptive as another reveals her soul to you. “ Such mutual vulnerability is “one of the great gifts of love.” The gaze of the artist is almost fetishistic, and once you notice it, all the pretenses in the paintings and in your mind begin to unravel. You have a hundred questions. Is the woman waiting in vain to be touched by a man who is too tentative or tepid? Is she playing a losing game of temptation with a husband who is really married to his nervous disorders, or to his paintings? Was this as far as he could go, in his imagination? Or, is this all that she will show him? Is this what she has had to become, for him? The couple had no children. Is the barrenness of these pictures a more literal key? These tantalizing scenarios toy with my inner voyeur, but I keep coming back to the lack of desperation in their distance. There is a comfortable certainty between them. Was the artist so reclusive that he found it safer just to look? Or was Ida the one who was aloof? That she never returns his gaze seems a reasonable clue. Perhaps he cannot bear for her to return his gaze. He is safe where he is. Perhaps she can only bear to be seen, not touched. There is no sex in these paintings, and yet, I feel, that sex is part of their subject. It’s there right away, in our uneasiness when we first find ourselves inside of them. Sex is many things, gorgeous, topsy-turvy, sacred, complicated, ugly, absent. Sex is a shape shifter. Whenever we thing we’ve got the hang of it, figured it all out, come to terms with whatever it is we need to address or accept or change, it reinvents itself and takes us for another sort of ride. We may find our ravenous curiousity about who is doing what to whom shameful and pathetic, but it’s rooted in more than lasciviousness. We are constantly trying to place ourselves and our shoulds and woulds and wouldn’ts on the human spectrum, and it’s a never-ending puzzle because where we find ourselves keeps changing. Every relationship and every unrequited desire changes the dynamic, exposing more of our interior world to ourselves and to others. Sexuality is the theatre in which our most intense fears and weaknesses and our most painful wounds show themselves. Whatever our particular darkness, it rears its ugly head in our sexual dramas. It is where we enact our unresolved rage, losses, regrets, and betrayals. In it, our obsessions and compulsions are manifest. Conversely, it is also where our highest traits are brought to light. It is where we overcome our selfishness and heal deep-seated hurts. It is where we practice generosity, love, fearlessness, courage, openness, commitment, nurture, or self-control. Hammershoi’s paintings are erotic hauntings. More frank treatments of sexuality, or vulgar ones, are in no short supply, and there are pragmatic perspectives and funny, bawdy ones, too. There are spellbinding explicit paeans to desire. But Vilhelm’s paintings remind us that sex is hidden. No matter how many times we have it, or don’t have it, analyze it, moralize it, medicalize it, avoid it, or confront it, there is still more mystery to fathom. In the deepest recesses of our psyches and our bodies is this mystery, the literal meaning of life, which we can never wholly grasp or catch up to. It is obscured even if we are addressing it directly, or doing it, for that matter. We return to it, over and over. We have all of us evolved various defenses and compulsions in response to the heaven and hell or Eros. Vilhelm’s paintings of empty rooms and his evocative portrayals of his most intimate relationship reveal some of his. They are open-ended questions, with a silence that is all at once patient, reverent, despondent, and poetic. He is on the outside looking in, while she is on the inside, looking away. Lorette C. Luzajic Lorette C. Luzajic is the editor of Ekphrastic, an artist, and the author of over fifteen books, including the poetry volumes, Solace, and The Astronaut's Wife. This piece originally appeared in her current book, Truck, and Other Thoughts on Art. I am so happy to announce my newly released collection of reflections on art.
Truck, and Other Thoughts on Art Lorette C. Luzajic an Idea Fountain edition, 2015 click on title or image to view or purchase on Amazon. MANY THANKS! This essay is long, but it seemed appropriate to run it after a Modigliani painting recently sold for one of the highest prices of all time. The piece is from my book, Fascinating Artists: twenty-five unusual lives. In the essay, I gave my take on the "why" of exorbitant artworks, but Modigliani's life as a subject overall was extremely interesting. Enjoy. Lorette Modigliani’s Lonely Masquerade (1884-1920) “Place me like a seal over your heart, like a seal on your arm, for love is as strong as death, its jealousy unyielding as the grave. It burns like blazing fire, like a mighty flame.” Song of Solomon 8:6 There are few cocktails more potent than this one in the effortless seduction of women: intelligence; passion; an aura of wickedness; cultural sophistication; a host of vulnerabilities, begging a nurturing touch; a stormy, rugged physicality blended with features that seem childlike, almost feminine, in shifting lights; and the sublime erotic charge from a man who can apparently see one’s soul and body at the same time. Viewing Modigliani’s remote, reverent, almost devout, sculptures and paintings, what woman wouldn’t want the thrill of Modi’s gaze, of his hands, his brush strokes, if only for a few days or hours? What woman would forego the profound mystery of unveiling herself to the artist, of feeling her defenses slip away, of feeling his hands form her body on his canvas? Such rhapsody could ruin a girl to lesser charms forever. Everyone wanted Modigliani. The depth of this sensual tug can be felt a century later, flipping through collections of his work, standing in front of his models in museums the world over. There is another element in our cocktail, one, when imbibed along with the others, guarantees instant and eternal intoxication. It is the threat of death. In 1953, Felix Marti Ibanez captured something of this in Gentry Magazine. “Modigliani paints a woman, her neck like a swan’s, her eyes like jade, her mouth set in infinite sadness.” There is a certain kind of immediacy and sensual urgency that come with the looming, dooming threat of death. Modigliani was sick with fevers, coughing, and alcoholism for most of his brief life. Meryle Secrest argues in Modigliani: a Life that his lifelong struggle with illness was the central force in his worldview, his passion, his art, and even his drug and alcohol addictions, which were born from the pain. Not only for the one who is dying, but for those who love him, an expiration date, sensed or certain, stokes the flames. It is sex, after all, the making of love, the making of life, which cheats death. It is this grave phenomenon, I believe, that causes our intense attraction to train wrecks. Nice men and women lament that though they long for stability, the “heart wants what it wants.” I believe that our strange penchants for prisoners, for cuckolding, for the wild child, for the self-destructive, for those whom we cannot have and hold, are rooted in the fleeting speed of life, in the glimmer of light under the shadow of death. Ibanez writes: “A man who knows he is going to die, as Modigliani did, knows there is only one way to defeat death- to live fast. What is lost in duration must be made up for in intensity.” This intensity was transferable to Modigliani’s passion for women, and whether or not these women understood tangibly the pending doom, the intuitive among them sensed it; their sensuality fed on it. Ibanez calls the artist’s women, “the most naked nudes in the history of art.” Later, he concludes that Modigliani’s figures, his women, seem “beyond death.” They are immortal, “ageless idols.” Those with even a rudimentary interest in culture can immediately conjure the trademark immortal elegance of Modigliani’s women. His name is synonymous with a style of iconic elongation and mysterious, eyeless portraiture that is difficult to describe but instantly recognizable. The Modigliani brand, if you will, is a striking amalgamation of influences that include his fascination with primitivistic and classical sculpture, the mythology of pagan Rome, Egyptian art, African masks, and Jewish iconographic traditions. His portraits and stone head sculptures possess a distinctive blend of intelligence, eroticism, and religiosity. Half of the portrayals of painter and sculptor Amedeo Modigliani focus on the artist as a tempestuous, brooding drunkard and drug addict, tortured by society and obsessed by his art. The other half laments the trivialization of genius and the clichés inherent in equating creative brilliance with the myth of insanity and addiction. “Since Modigliani’s death in 1920,” Maurice Berger writes, (in the epilogue for Mason Klein’s Modigliani: Beyond the Myth), “discussions of his work have been motivated by similar clichés and half-truths about artistic practice and temperament. These histrionic, fundamentally anti-intellectual approaches to the study of the artist and his work, fixated as they are on the biographical triumvirate of debauchery, illness, and tragedy, have helped turn Modigliani into a trivial art historical figure, an artist adored by the public but viewed with condescension by many scholars and curators.” It is true that Modigliani is woven into art histories as volatile and self-absorbed, drowning his torments in absinthe and laudanum, churning out bastard children along the way. Yet the academics that disavow the public’s fascination with tragedy and dismiss such a dismal picture as populist gossip miss a very important point: an annoying little thing called truth. And in this case, what is very closely linked to the truth, is something of the essence of the Modigliani appeal. Human nature embodies light and dark. Both are parts of us, and so of course we are often drawn to the darkness, that vast abyss of terrible mystery. Looking into it makes us cling to life. Between reality and our natural attraction to drama and narrative, we have the truth, which is seldom picture perfect. Doom and gloom, however, is never enough on its own: the vast majority of dead drug addicts and drunks fade into forgotten obscurity. But pretentious disdain for scandalmongers and muckrakers does not take into account that art and biography are interchangeable. Many scholars discount this truth, dismissing the very essence of art- the artist himself. It is not his decadence alone that attracts. That is only one ingredient in that heady brew. When academics assume an elite understanding of art, with their important but ultimately secondary theories of mastery and craftsmanship and composition; when they assume that their studied conclusions make them trusted tastemakers, they are sorely wrong. No theorizing or scholasticism can compete with or overshadow people’s preferences. And like it or not, those preferences are inexorably linked to the cult of personality. There are a variety of reasons why we love art. In Modi’s case, there is an elegiac tension, a desperate life force under the serene elegance of his sensual portraits. In contrast to the volatile intensity with which he lived, these coolly erotic tributes gaze eternally, dispassionately, beyond. They are frozen under his heat. Modigliani was born to Sephardic Jewish lineage in Italy in 1884, the same year that his affluent family lost everything in bankruptcy. Modi would continue in lifelong poverty. Chronic illness began early, with childhood fevers and pleurisy. This meant little Amedeo spent most of his time sick or convalescing. This was time he spent studying and practicing art, since both were passions and sedentary pursuits. Despite their crash into poverty, his family remained cosmopolitan and valued sophistication and culture. French, Spanish, and Italian were all spoken in his household. The works of poets and philosophers were considered mandatory for culture and enrichment- Nietzsche, Emerson, Wilde, Spinoza. Because the child nearly died of typhoid fever, Modigliani’s mother reluctantly permitted him to quit high school. This gave the inquisitive youth free rein to libraries and daydreams and drawing lessons. Because of his health, he was sent to milder climes like Naples, Capri, Rome, and Venice, where as a teenage artist he practiced and studied in reputable studios. He also joined his superiors in the exchange of ideas in long conversations. In adulthood, plagued by weak lungs and tuberculosis, Modi discovered that alcohol and laudanum helped quell coughing fits and convulsions and eased pain. His self-medicating became a furious dependency. The saturation in art and poetry and religious history, and the penchant for intoxication may not have culminated in greatness had there been an absence of passion and love. But this gorgeous blend of intelligence and volatility with his sensuality was infinitely appealing to women. There was no shortage of paramours. In turn, his portraits of women, nude or clothed, are the pinnacles of his profound talent. Biographer June Rose describes him in Modigliani, the Pure Bohemian, as, “always with a beautiful girl by his side.” She surmises that, “Women pursued him and so many loved him that he must have been a marvelous lover, sensual, tender, and gravely courteous, but a dreamer…” Whether one views the man as a lothario or a Romeo is irrelevant, perhaps, to the women who loved him. Modigliani was handsome and charming, but his turbulent moods and his penniless, sometimes homeless, existence were not exactly selling points. At some points, the artist was so desperate that he gave his work away in bistros in exchange for food, an absurd contrast to the multiple millions fetched by his works today. But these women were spellbound by his tragic beauty and by his talent. Modigliani worked prolifically but earned very little money. This was in part due to his own exacting standards and tempestuous destruction of works he deemed sub-par. According to biographer Alfred Werner, the artist destroyed all of his earliest works as a young man in Paris, exclaiming, “Childish baubles, done when I was a dirty bourgeois!” The work he loved, he would trade for a meal or a place to say. He would also give to women the portraits he had made of them. One of his most famous lovers was Beatrice Hastings, a poet and an educated eccentric who vigorously defended women’s rights to birth control ahead of her time. She sometimes carried a pet duck in a basket and lived a life of colourful adventure and coarse commentary. Though known for harsh descriptives of her lover- “spoilt,” “drunk,” and “unshaven,” among them- she also considered his artwork the real deal and showed it in her studio. Her influence helped him with several sales. Another romance was with Anna Andreyevna Gorenko, better known as Anna Akhmatova, considered one of the greatest Russian poets of the 20th century. She went on to write acclaimed masterpieces of witness to the Stalinist atrocities in her homeland. She met while honeymooning in Paris with her husband. Ultimately, Anna returned to her husband. In Memoir of Modigliani, the poet writes about her love affair. “In 1910 I saw him very rarely, just a few times. But he wrote to me during the whole winter. I remember some sentences from his letter. One was: ‘Vous êtes en moi comme une hantise’ (you are obsessively part of me.)” Anna went on to say, “Modigliani’s divine attributes were still veiled. He had the head of Antinous, and in his eyes was a golden gleam – he was unlike anyone in the world. I shall never forget his voice. He lived in dire poverty, and I don’t know how he lived. He enjoyed no recognition whatsoever as a painter…I thought even then that he clearly saw the world through different eyes to ours.” There were countless other women who professed undying love. But perhaps the most tumultuous and tragic love affair was his final one, with Jeanne Hebuterne (who was played superbly by Elsa Zylberstein in the otherwise wretched flick, Modigliani.) It was a doomed romance in many ways, not the least of which was Modi’s rapidly deteriorating health and alcoholism. There was also an age difference. Jeanne was nineteen, and Modigliani was over thirty. A major obstacle was Jeanne’s Catholic family, who reportedly hated Jews. It is likely Daddy may also have preferred someone who was not a bum. So when Jeanne found herself pregnant with Modi’s “illegitimate” child, her father went through the roof. Jeanne defied her family and moved into the artist’s squalid room, an unwise move that endangered their child but reflected the intensity of her passion and devotion. Making their home with a shared family bed on a dirty mattress in a filthy little room, Jeanne’s family was unmoved by their steps toward “legitimacy” when the pair married. In Meryle Secrest’s book, she argues for the absolute centrality of the artist’s illness. She suggests that everything about him was born from this chronic, lifelong struggle. She argues that the enfant terrible shtick was a disguise that he conceived to hide his contagious tuberculosis from his peers. He needed to continue to function among them as he strove for creative recognition. If they’d known the truth about his illness, he would have been taken to a sanitarium and that would have been like prison for him. “Here was no shambling drunk but a man on a desperate mission, running out of time and calculating what he had to do in order to go on working and concealing his secret for however long remained… It must have been a courageous and lonely masquerade.” I think it’s possible that Modi could have kept his dying a secret through robust theatrics, but it’s unlikely his drug use was merely a “cover.” I am convinced that his tuberculosis and concurrent health issues were central to his story. I often maintain that denying the primacy of addictions or other details we don’t like in someone’s story is actually dehumanizing. It’s also quite unlikely that Modigliani was the only artist in the Belle Epoque and pre-Jazz Age eras who hung around the cafes, parlours, galleries, and speakeasies without his fair share of decadent behaviour. Nonetheless, Secrest’s focus on his illness remains highly insightful. For example, she suggests that the constant knowledge of pending death created, in part, his passion for life and love. The obsessive pace at which he worked could have been fuelled by the persistent idea that he was running out of time. Furthermore, the looming threat of death gave life a sense of preciousness and beauty. Perhaps tuberculosis also granted to Modigliani a sense of artistic genuineness, a shared torturous bond. After all, it was how many greats met their maker, including Chopin, Keats, all three Bronte sisters, D.H. Lawrence, the great Chekhov, and many others. In this view, he may have also romanticized his own poverty and addiction as well as the TB, since as we discussed, madness itself had long been a perceived marker of the authenticity of the artist. Today, appreciation of Modi’s genius is near universal, and his work sells for millions of dollars. Still, a group of pranksters committed a fraud in the early ‘80s to protest what they perceived as ludicrous and fickle trends in the art market. Making use of longstanding legends of Modigliani destroying his work, three youth tossed some stone sculptures into a canal where Modi, in a huff, had been rumoured to sink some poorly received works. The art world was briefly aflame when draining the canal yielded pieces that every expert was sure had been created by Modigliani. The discovery was trumpeted the world over, but the excitement was short lived, as several of the pranksters came forward and confessed. They subsequently demonstrated their ability to create Modigliani-style sculpture to prove their abilities. The purpose of their hoax was to trump the authority of the art historian and expose the ludicrousness of value attribution in art trends. There is some truth to what these students expressed, but this kind of thinking misses a few important points. One of the greatest indicators of value is rarity, whether in gemstones or haute couture or art collecting. When someone dies, naturally the rarity of their products increases, getting still more rare over time as works are lost or deteriorate. Secondly, it is asinine to assume that one’s ability to copy the style of another artist devalues that artist’s talent. Many masters of the fine arts learned and practiced by directly copying their masters before them. Perhaps these tricksters should pursue their own skills in art and imagination! There is nothing new under the sun, and despite the dazzling originality of Modigliani’s voice, his work too merged a number of influences, from Brancusi to El Greco to Egyptian history to Cycladic art to Jewish ethnographic portraiture. But the most important factor that these hoaxers dismiss or fail to grasp is the power of essentialism. It may seem silly to be willing to pay a million for a sheet torn from Van Gogh’s sketchbook, and throw away the exact same drawing copied from him by Joe Shmo. And some will see this as evidence that all art is worthless, after all, or that the standards by which we judge art are faulty. But this misses the essence of art entirely. Art is both worthless and priceless. In other words, it is worth only what someone will pay for it. I may find it absurd that anyone would pay millions for Rothko’s gargantuan sheets of muddled orange rectangles. But someone else chooses to pay that, and so it is they who set the price. But why? Because of essentialism. The essence of art is not whether it is nearly impossible to create or reproduce, because nothing is. It is in the fact that a particular person touched it, put their heart into it, their skin cells, their presence, their time and labour and love. There are many facets in the lure of essentialism. It may be the dizzy edge of a brush with death, in the case of those drawn towards objects owned by serial killers or pieces of a dead movie star’s crashed car. Or, an object can act as a time machine, when we know that our great-grandmother used a family heirloom, or that something existed a thousand years ago and we now behold it in a museum. Essentialism is a bridge of geography, bringing us the world, in the case of artifacts that were taken from another country. There are many, many reasons why the essence of an object might give us pleasure. We may enjoy the fact that it was made by or in the presence of a person with intelligence, rarity, greatness, heroism; perhaps it is, for us, our brush with a warrior, with a celebrity we love, with supreme physical prowess, with history, with genius, or divinity, or a family tie. The unique talents and story of Modigliani mean that some people care a great deal about things that he made and touched. These same people do not care about sculptures carved by some unknown engineering student or dockworker, even if they possessed the technical skill of replication. The making of a thing is not in and of itself enough. We want that link to the individual creator. It is this grim fact to which I relegate my own anonymity, a fact that millions of other struggling artists must also accept. Those who do purchase my work must perceive at least a shimmer of brilliance or beauty; perhaps they find me insightful or funny. I am deeply grateful to these supporters, but in the scheme of the universe, they are few and far between. It is highly likely that in my lifetime or after it, few will care enough about the objects I have touched, including my paintings, to pay dividends just to have my ghost nearby. Essentialism is a concept delved into at length by Yale scientist Paul Bloom in How Pleasure Works. He explains with great clarity the unconscious impact essentialism has on our choices and our pleasures. The desire to own an original Modigliani stems from the same place in our soul that values a ballplayer’s autograph. A forger can easily copy Michael Jackson’s or Marilyn Monroe’s signature. But the real deal is far more valuable, because Monroe touched the pen and the paper herself. The idea of transference of essence, that an object can carry a part of the person, is the driving logic behind sympathetic magic. Note that hexes and spells cannot work unless their targets and initiators believe. And when there is belief, it is powerful, and primitive, and as irrational as love. This sympathetic magic is it is common for people to sleep with the clothing of a deceased or otherwise gone partner. They are holding on to some part of who they have lost. It is why people believe psychics can “see” better when holding the belongings of a lost child or dead relative. We pass our wedding rings and baby shoes down through our family, and they are treasured beyond riches even when their monetary value is worthless. These impulses are the same ones many of us condemn when we hear about some pervert nicking a girl’s knickers off the floor to take home with him, or when we read in the paper about some weirdo keeping his victim’s finger or stuffed animal as a “trophy.” Beautiful or disgusting, the power of essentialism should not be underestimated. Consider its deep resonance in religion- supposed relics of Christ’s cross or shroud or bones of the saints are deeply revered. At its most extreme and most primitive, the near-universal trait in history of ritual cannibalism is driven by essentialism, the desire to imbibe the traits of a person, whether as a warrior or as an ancestor, to keep him or her as a part of one forever, a way to integrate their essence. Essentialism is a profound intimacy, a relationship, a defense against our own lonely masquerade. All of this is why I argue that an artist’s biography is inextricably linked to his or her work. His life story, his struggles, his scandals, his thoughts all matter when it comes to assessing our connection to him. When some scholars argue against the maudlin sentimentality of masses glomming onto tragedy, claiming that artwork should stand apart from the personality that created it, they are missing the point. It is the relationship we have with a person, perceived or actual, that increases the value of their cultural contribution. It is the perceived intimacy that determines how deep our attachment will run. Their essence is a conglomeration of all these life experiences. Their original art is the essence of their essence, if you will. As Bloom observes, much of the pleasure or connection we derive from art, much of its value, is, “rooted in an appreciation of the human history underlying its creation.” Modigliani held a powerful erotic charge through his passions, his trials, and his talents. His illustrative skills were important to his women, who gave up their mighty comforts and good reputations- indeed, their very lives- to be with him. The art remains our tie to this charismatic personality and the strong tide he exerted over our emotions. His excesses and tragedies are not merely the fodder of the unwashed masses. They are an inescapable essence in the artwork itself. They are vital, they are its vitality. According to Oxford, the word “vital” means, “critical” or “absolutely necessary.” Elsewhere, it turns up full circle as “essential.” And if you go all the way back to its roots, the etymology of “vital” is “life” itself. We can get close to Modigliani by examining his paintings, and even closer by contemplating his originals. Januszczak writes, “When you lean closer to any example of a pale and silent madonna, clothed or unclothed, you discover brushwork that is always restless and insouciant and brave.” Essentialism is not rational, but neither are the other profound mysteries and joys in life, from the varieties of religious experiences to falling in love. If Jeanne had been more rational, she would have stayed with her family and raised her baby, eventually finding a suitor who could provide her with stability. But in all probability, she was, in that blush of youth, powerless to help herself. She couldn’t live without Modigliani, so she stayed with him. In the end, Jeanne was sure that she could remain with him, that they could merge essences, if she experienced death, too. When he died at thirty-six, of excess and of tuberculosis meningitis, Jeanne concluded their epic love in a garish finale. Mary Morton writes, “Two days after his death, poor Jeanne, pregnant with their second child, jumped to her death out of a window of her parents’ apartment, sealing the romantic tragedy of the Modigliani myth with a gruesome flourish.” Young Jeanne could not live without him; now the rest of us who are moved by his life and talents want a piece of him. I cherish his vision of beauty and sorrow and passion through reproductions of his work. Through these, his story, his essence, lives on, especially in the treasured originals in museums and private homes. And I can go there, to the gallery, to transcend a century, to stand beside him, just to be in proximity of a portrait, near a canvas, near him, near anything, something that was touched by his hands. Lorette C. Luzajic Brendan Dixon on Photographer Elizabeth Stone It was hot, and humid. I was playing the tourist. We were visiting friends in Virginia when our son was about a year old (meaning, many years ago) and they insisted on taking us to Colonial Williamsburg. Since my theme park experiences were all reduced to variations on Disneyland, I expected more of the same: History hung over a plastic frame. We were standing outside the Cooper’s (that is, the Barrel Maker’s) workshop: a medium-sized white building, more like a garage than a barn. A small wooden fence kept me at the safe tourist-distance, marking out his work area in front of the shop. The Cooper sat to the left, just within the shadows and out of the humid sun, on a three-legged stool (naturally) in white billowing sleeves and dark, grimy knickers. A leather apron hung from around his stooped neck spreading across his thighs. Against his apron rested a slat for his latest barrel. With a hand-held plane he peeled curling shavings from the slat. He intently watched each stroke of the plane. He rubbed the emerging edge with his hand between strokes, as if feeling his way forward. I began asking the normal, semi-snarky questions: How long have you done this? What do you do with the rest of your time? Is making barrels hard? And so on. But what I got back was not the snarky, here-is-my-response-to-an-obvious-tourist answer. I got something different. And what I got started my journey to rethink the things we’ve lost, what we should strive to keep, and what I would eventually learn about from Elizabeth Stone: Craft. I met Elizabeth Stone ten or so years after the Cooper, trying for craft to assuage my disaffection with work. She was in Seattle, along with her best friend, teaching a course offered through the Rocky Mountain School of Photography, where she would eventually spend eighteen years. I had been fumbling with digital cameras for about three or four years. My work was more miss than hit, and even my “hits” were never spot-on. They were lucky breaks, accidental works of near art. Disappointed, I took, what seemed to me the right next steps: I bought the proper equipment. I read a few books. And I signed up for the RMSP course. I believed that somehow out of my fresh set of Canon L-series lenses and the freedom to shoot for a week that elusive true art would emerge. I was partially right. Elizabeth grew up in a household filled with craft and immersed in art. Her journey began as the unexpected benefit of growing up frequently ill during her early elementary grades. “I was more often out of than in school.” She recounted to me about those couple of years, “I ended up doing a lot of crafts and drawing.” Her mother, who had worked and then volunteered for the Albany Institute of History and Art, cultivated Elizabeth’s endeavors. Her fascination focused as an early teen when her parents gave her, her first camera. Her high school classes increased her exposure to the medium through access to a large format camera, which she thought “was completely cool and exciting.” The darkroom, the chemicals, and the shooting process drew her in. But after high school Elizabeth struggled for direction. Her heart split: She loved animals and art. She vacillated between pursuing a biology degree or studying art at the Rhode Island School of Design. Art lost that first round. She started school at Trinity College in Hartford, but soon moved to Montana, graduating from Montana State University with a Wildlife Biology degree. Elizabeth told me “I see a lot of correlations between my science background and art, both have a love of observation, a skill that is pretty prevalent in both fields.” After college she went to work as a veterinary technician, married, divorced, and wound up evaluating her life. Art won this round. “I learned that I wanted photography to become my vocation,” she said looking back. She spent her savings on an RMSP summer intensive course, an eleven week immersion designed to jump start photography careers. She was hooked, but she still had a problem: There were few photography jobs under the big Montana sky. She then took a risk. She asked RMSP if they had any openings. That question created the fork in her road forward when they offered her an office position that soon led to teaching. It also led to me taking her class years later in Seattle. I remember sitting in her class, about ten years ago, taking detailed notes in my Moleskine (another required accoutrement, or so I thought). We talked about light and colour, form and balance. I learned how the frame creates its images. I jotted tables relating exposure to f/stops and light. But what I remember most were Elizabeth’s side-comments, as if I were her apprentice for a week. She explained patiently the need to see through the lens as I frowned over images, which, to my surprise, looked no better than those I had taken before her class. She encouraged me to experiment, to try things, to learn how my camera worked and behaved, to not fear all of its buttons and dials and settings. I remember standing shocked-still, gingerly holding that expensive camera and lens, as Elizabeth’s best friend described an experiment in which Elizabeth swung her camera in full circles with the shutter open just so she could see what it looked like and how it behaved. About midweek during the course we met early, around 7am, at the Pat Calvert Greenhouse. It’s located in the high part of Seattle’s Washington Park and overlooks downtown. After we’d been waiting for nearly an hour in the cold, when we were finally allowed inside, my camera lens had completely fogged over. I held the lens out to Elizabeth and growled. I felt frustrated. How could I photograph anything (and we had only an hour) with my lens a sloppy mess? She absorbed my grumblings without pause. She saw in my lens an opportunity, not an obstacle. “Shoot as the lens clears,” she said. She pushed me to see an advantage in what to me was a limitation, guiding me to see that art can emerge out of unlikely places. I took a breath and wound my way through the narrow walkways encroached by plants. My first few images showed nothing but indistinct blotches of muted color. But, trusting Elizabeth, I continued to try. As I did, images started to seep through the fog. They are not all works of high-art (I still bumbled about with composition and exposure), but some remain among my prized images. I learned then that the camera, like strings to a violinist, words to a writer, or ink to an illustrator, is a tool. I needed to know that tool, to become intimate with it. I had to feel, as the Cooper did, my way forward. Elizabeth saw the opportunity that day because of years invested in her art. She’s developed a voice that speaks through the abstract and the up-close. Perhaps the highest compliment I can pay her is simply this: Elizabeth sees. Her love for life and art entangle in her series, Death by Drowning, Lucy’s Water Bowl. Despite an intense fear of moths (rooted, she pondered, in a obscure bedtime story book), in her words, the “stunning” beauty of a dead moth floating in her dog’s cold, stainless steel bowl “demanded” attention. It grew into a habit of checking the bowl daily with camera in hand. But these are not iPhone quickies or moth selfies. Her composure gave dignity to that which most of us would dump and miss. She found the value in those small tragedies of life lost. By the mid-2000s, a couple of years after our class, Elizabeth had a good body of work, photographing everything she said from “weddings to animal portraits,” and had been a sought-after instructor at RMSP for years. Then life changed: she lost her much loved father in 2007. “That really shook me up,” she told me as we talked about her progression as an artist. “I took some time off and re-evaluated my life. I ended up with the idea of becoming an Artist-in-Residence and got encouragement with a National Park Service fellowship in 2010.” The fellowship gave Elizabeth three weeks to spend “thinking of nothing but photography.” “It transformed how I thought of myself as an artist,” she recalled. Those few weeks, spent at the Acadia National Park along the Maine coastline, proved pivotal. Elizabeth moved from building a body of successful images (as seen in her collection Pretty Pictures I Can’t Ignore) toward becoming a conceptual photographer. Instead of capturing images reactively, she started working towards them from a prior concept. Elizabeth then joined her two passions — her love of the animal world and photography — in the series Making Tracks. The work began during a 2011 artist residency at the Ucross Foundation in Clearmont, Wyoming. “At the time…I was reading ‘The Tiger’ by John Vaillant. Vaillant describes reading tracks as one of the earliest languages…I was drawn to their prints in snow or grass. They became the simplest form of the story of the animal’s existence.” Tracks are transient, ephemeral, yet, like the floating insects she honoured, give dignity and place to the animals that left them. Making Tracks draws on craft now instinctive from years of devotion. “I’m kind of a minimalist by nature,” Elizabeth noted. My notes from her instruction at the RMSP class reflect this: Use simple backgrounds. Focus on one thing. Light is the subject. She brings these together in Making Tracks through quietly composed monochromatic images that focus on line and balance, weighing carefully the space and frame. In them she snips from the living world a fragment of existence, the only fragment many of us can leave behind: the marks of their passage. A couple of years later, another concept spilled out of her files from years of image making. The accumulated slides crowded Elizabeth’s essentialist nature. Thousands of them overwhelmed her storage. Since she’d digitally scanned those that mattered, she launched on a new experiment. “I just got tired of all this stuff,” she reflected, so I “took them with me on this residency at The Jentel Foundation in Wyoming with literally no idea what I would do.” Instead of lighting them on fire (which she did consider) she sat alone in the wooden room and began, using her thumbnail, to pry and peel each slide apart. As she separated them into piles, against all training, she began touching her slides. “That was a whole new way of thinking about the images,” she said, “The process was freeing.” It became a project of taking her “past and thinking about it on a wholly different level.” She disassembled the slides into their essential parts, which she christened skins, shells, and meats. Next, without aim, she began piecing together free-standing sculptures lit only by a couple of light boxes whose hues had aged into blue-green and apricot. And then she embarked on image making. Those images — in the series Skins, Shells, and Meats — bring to my mind doors upon doors and windows receding into deepening blue. Others felt fluid, almost liquid with color and form. With these “remnants and bones” of her past, Elizabeth captured her own tracks through her transformation as an artist, the marks of her own passage. The lights dimmed at the close of our second class day. We sat around simple folding tables in a stark subterranean conference room of pale yellow walls at a Holiday Inn not far from Seattle’s Space Needle. I had sent my images to Elizabeth the night before. They were now on display for the entire class to see and, more concerning, for Elizabeth to critique. Looking at their projections I knew I had just pointed my lens and pressed the shutter button with no pause to see what had arrested my attention. Disappointed swelled. I squirmed. But Elizabeth remained encouraging, nurturing. I shifted and slumped in my seat as she explained not just why and how the image “did not work,” but what I could, and should do differently, next time to make one that did work. Over the remaining days, I crafted a few images, half-a-dozen at most, that I still look back at and smile over. They are not complete failures; they hold glimmers of beauty. Through Elizabeth’s guidance I caught a glimpse of craft. Elizabeth’s artistic shift resulted, not only in some of her best work, but also in recognition: In 2013 she won the PhotoNOLA Review Prize for her series Skins, Shells, and Meats and Making Tracks. Roy Flukinger, from The Harry Ransom Center, called her work in Making Tracks “lyrical, mystical, and symbolic.” The judges felt Elizabeth allowed the “animals who made these signs of passage an expressive voice.” Elizabeth embodies craft, even more than the Williamsburg Cooper who gave me that smack down years ago. Her persistent pursuit spans decades and tens-of-thousands of images. As she mused to me: “Being thoughtful takes time.” Not everyone may resonate with her abstract leanings, but Elizabeth has vision — a term unfulfilled as often as it is used. She sees the beauty buried in unlikely places and unexpected objects. And, isn’t that the purpose of photography? To show us that which we miss in our own hurried passings. Brendan Dixon Brendan Dixon is an avocational writer living in Seattle. He writes on art and life, or whatever topic strikes. In Pursuit of Me
My day started out lost in the twisting streets of Rome. At that point I was living in the thirteenth district called Trastevere, an area considered ancient and population consisting of locals and students, luckily still kept secret from the onslaught of surrounding tourists. My map remained in my purse and I didn’t ask for directions. I loved proving to myself that I could find my way independently. If I just kept wandering I would eventually find the Tiber River, and could always find my way home from there. The river was the only guide I needed. This was how I stumbled across the fountain. One street led to another, sharp corners turned me around, and I found myself in Piazza Mattei. A quiet square tucked away, seemingly separate from the usual chaos of Rome. What first struck me was that there were no benches in the square, which seemed uncharacteristic. Piazzas are defined as public spaces, and in my experience they acted as gathering places and spots of rest and leisure. At night I would go out with friends to different Piazzas. We would sit on the fountain steps and drink cheap Peroni beer while mingling with the locals. These warm crisp nights would always end in gelato dates with charming Italian’s, or on one occasion a Vespa ride up Janiculum hill overlooking the best view of Rome’s skyline. The squares were the initial draw that brought people together. Or maybe drew the American tourists which in turn attracted insatiable Italian men. Either way, the scent of sex hung thick in the air of these piazzas. I walked through Piazza Mattei and examined the Turtle Fountain, the structure that lay in its center, sculpted by Taddeo Landini. It consisted of four young boys standing around a column. These youths were sculpted in a frozen moment of sweeping movement, a perpetual state of reaching. They simultaneously urged four turtles to drink from the top marble basin while pushing dolphins down with their feet and grasping their tails, as if to hold them in place. It gave a sense of pushing and pulling, providing tension. The boys faces were set looking straight ahead, locks of their hair caught in an invisible breeze. They looked confident and sure of themselves, like any Italian male I met in the city. There is a romantic legend of why the Turtle Fountain was built in Piazza Mattei. I heard this by eavesdropping on a tour guide that wandered in beside me. Apparently the fountain was used as a grand gesture to win over the respect of a future father in law. Duke Mattei had lost his fortunes due to a gambling addiction. Because of the loss of his wealth the father of his fiancé tried to cancel their engagement. To impress the father the Duke had the fountain constructed secretly in the quiet of a single night. The next morning he opened the curtain to let the father behold the beautifully erected fountain. He was so impressed that he allowed for the engagement to continue. And to commemorate the occasion they had the window overlooking the fountain covered over with brick so no one else could enjoy the view. There actually is a mysterious brick laid window in piazza Mattei overlooking the fountain. The legend, however, is thought to be false. It is unlikely they could have built the structure quietly and in one night. Plus, historians believe it to have been built over the course of ten years. That’s one of the things I love about Rome though, how history and myth become intertwined allowing art to become this portal for cultural storytelling. I wandered slowly out of the square and thought of the Galleria Borghese, which I had recently visited. In it there was a statue of Apollo and Daphne that reminded me of the same sweeping motion I saw in the Turtle fountain as the boys reached their right arms towards the sky. The Greek myth foretold in Bernini’s marble statue is one of pursuit. Apollo had bragged to Cupid of his victory over the Python, claiming his skill with a bow to be superior. In retaliation, Cupid shot Apollo with a love arrow and shot the beautiful nymph, Daphne, with an arrow to be repelled by love. Thus began Apollo’s pursuit of the nymph. Daphne, however, begged her father, the river god Peneus, to allow her never to marry. She wanted to remain pure and untouched by any man. But that request came with a cost. Daphne would be forced to change her form and give up her physical body. As Apollo chased Daphne’s supple figure through the woods she called upon her father to help. The statue captured the crucial moment when Daphne chose to sacrifice her life rather than marry the love smitten Apollo. It eternalizes Apollo’s restless pursuit, shows his hand reached around and grasping Daphne’s waist. However, the instance his fingers contacted her skin she began to transform. Tree bark grew where flesh had been, encasing her torso. Daphne’s mouth lay open in exaltation as her fingertips grew into thin tree branches and leaves. Her hair, hung high in the air by the force of her flee, tangled and melded into the branches growing from her fingers. Roots that ground into the soft soil replaced her toes. The detail of the statue itself was exquisite. Bernini captured the physical climax of the moment. Apollo’s back foot was raised as he propelled himself towards her, his abdomen tight from strain and caves flexed from forward motion. Daphne’s body was twisted as she tried to swivel out of his grasp, arm raised and hand flexed as she transforms into a Laurel tree. The statue of Apollo and Daphne left a lingering sensation in my memory. The look of pure lust and need carved into Apollo’s stony face in contrast to Daphne’s determination to escape. I could not understand Daphne’s need to remain pure and untouched, a virgin. But I could understand Apollo’s lust. It was etched on the face of the men I passed on the street. The toothy smiles and burning feeling of their eyes boring into my backside as I walk past them. That said, it is a power that men give women, the ability to be objects of desire. Things to be wooed, people to build fountains for. I made my way back towards the main street, still hoping to find the river. My need for coffee sidetracked me. As I walked with my back to the Tiber I noticed a gentleman trying to get my attention. Walking step for step with me was a tall Italian, tanned with a boyishly lopsided grin. His eyes were warm pools of captured light that had a mischievous glint about them. In his rush he was trying to communicate with me through a mouth full of food, trying to swallow and talk to me better. It seemed to be a very ‘in the moment’ decision he made to chase me down the street. I no longer remember exactly what he said to me as we walked. The memory is a blur of colour and movement and lost bearings. But I do remember him asking me at a stoplight, with dripping charm, “So, where are we going?” I had to make a split second decision and rested on the edge of unease of whether to trust this stranger or not. But his pursuit of me piqued my interest enough for me to tell him I was looking for a café. He, of course, said he knew the best café in Rome, and would take me there. A café seemed safe enough to me. His large hand grasped mine as he led me deeper into Rome. The river was gone. At first I tried to remember markers so I could find my way back, but quickly became overwhelmed by the short twisting streets and sharply narrow alleyways. I realize now that he had been trying to get me in the vicinity of his apartment. His long legs took us so fast that I kept tripping over the tilted cobble stones, face flushing hot red. At one point he asked me to close my eyes. With my eyes closed the Italian led me confidently, telling me when to step up or to watch out for broken cobble stones. We walked for an impossibly long time. I could hear people around me and feel their energy as they milled about. Then, without breaking motion he suddenly spun me around and pulled me tight into his arms, leaving me immobile and encased by his warmth. I smelled his masculine musk and couldn’t help myself from melting a bit deeper into his grasp. But I was sure to inwardly berate myself for falling for this obvious ploy of seduction. He told me to open my eyes. I gasped as I looked up at the building towering above us. We were standing Piazza della Rotanda, in front of the Pantheon. I had not been there before. The structure loomed above us as I took in the pure totality of the structure. The rows upon rows of marble pillars that impossibly managed to hold up the ancient entryway. And the amount of people in the square was overwhelming, it seemed as though we were the only two standing still as I experienced the site for the first time. And in that moment I didn’t care how many other girls he may have done that for, in that same spot, with his arms holding them that same way. I allowed myself to succumb to the moment. I let him bring me back to his place after coffee. It was an apartment like I had never seen before. Located near the Spanish Steps we approached a comically large green door, like the draw bridge to a castle. A normal sized door was cut into the larger one, and we entered through it. His apartment was small, with tiny steep stairs (more like a ladder) leading up to his bedroom. The bathroom had no door and the toilet faced the bed. I did not pee while I was there. I left his place later that day, and threaded my way through the streets amongst the people, finally asking someone to point me in the direction of the Tiber. I was a long walk from home, but that was okay. The river moved alongside me in consistent strides, keeping me company. People passed my leisurely stroll as they hurried along. I crossed more statues of stoic males and let them rest, frozen in their foreverness, just in my peripherals as I propelled myself homeward. The man made me promise, as I left, that I would call him. Said he genuinely wanted to see me again before I left. And I felt overwhelmed by the intense look in his eyes, witnessed the aggressive determination of a prize to be won. And that was the point I settled back into reality, whisked suddenly out of our spontaneous sexual encounter, and thought it strange he would ask that of me. I thought the whole point was the chase. He got me, had me, what more would he want of me? I met him when I was still new to Rome, and during my stay there were many more men like him, conquest warriors of American women. And I was okay with that, it was nice to be pursued, to put up my defenses only to have them beaten down, reaching the point where I gave in to their desires. The Italian men I met didn’t give up, never walked away from the challenge I presented. While I knew it wasn’t real, that I was just another target, I allowed myself to relish in the compliments. In a way it taught me how to love myself better. I walked with this newfound confidence that commanded attention. In Italy I stood at the crossroads all women stand at, and had to decide what kind of woman I wanted to be. Do I place my body on a pedestal, out of reach and divine, or do I give in to my own sexual desires and take from men the same thing they want to take from me. There is no right or wrong way to live, so I followed my instinct and chased the excitement that Roman nights held for me. I chose to give myself willingly to these men while the virtuous Daphne sat appeased in the museum, her Laurel tree form just out of reach of the devoted Apollo. Roxy Hearn This piece was originally published in Cargo Literary. Roxy Hearn is a dance major and creative writing major graduate from York University, Toronto. She has been published in Incendies Magazine, the Wild Quarterly, Jonah Magazine, Cargo Literary, Pictures & Portraits, Untethered, and Tracer Publishing. She has also studied abroad in England and Italy. Reflections on Kwele and Sefulo Masks, and West African Sculptures at the Gallery Downtown10/22/2015 Reflections on Kwele and Sefulo Masks, and West African Sculptures at the Gallery Downtown
There is a room at the Art Gallery of Ontario with a few dozen sculptures from Cameroon and Niger. The air is heavy with spirits. Many years ago, I had the privilege of exploring an anthropology museum at the University of British Columbia. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of masks and carvings from native North and South America, Africa, Haiti, the Caribbean, Oceania, and beyond. Whether spirits are real or a figment of human imagination, all museums are haunted, and this one was teeming with ghosts. Today I sit for an hour or so with the ghosts of Chad, raconteurs of another world far away. African primitive art was a key driver of modern art, when painters and sculptors in Europe began to explore art history outside of the western traditions. They pared away what they saw as excesses and sought the soul of creativity. Perhaps their insinuations that Africans were less civilized and thus closer to the gods was patronizing, but their admiration was genuine. Matisse, Picasso, Modigliani and their peers keenly adopted some stylistic cues from tribal artisans, from startling simplicity to linear elegance to fearless amalgamations of colour. Today it is impolitic to discuss a culture as primitive or weigh in on their superstitions, but every time I enter this sacred space, I hear the deep thunder of ritual drums. I feel icy fingers of fear at the base of my spine, even as the blistering humidity of the jungle engulfs me. Art is stronger than the changing whims of fashionable correctness, and the emotions these extraordinary works were created with are powerful magic. It is easy to see why early missionaries to Africa and Polynesia were frightened, why they felt surrounded by evil spirits. The ones who haughtily dismiss such fears as racist, from the comfort of their well-lit, modern lives, are the ones who got it wrong. They might not believe in spirits, but the artists certainly did. Their creations were ritual in nature, meant to conjure and to dispel. Some rites were to banish and protect from evil, and others were to summon it. In the darkest times, such ceremonies extended to cannibalism and human sacrifice, as with the Druids and the Aztecs. Fear is an honest, visceral response to the art, and it is abject pretension for these contemptuous critics to think they would have responded otherwise. They are disconcerting indeed, these crude slashes and flapping vulvas, the toothy screams, the nightmare faces and strangely hunched physicality. The angry, angular breasts, the monstrous penises. There are millennia of spirits in these frozen wooden statues. As eerily still as they are, they are alive, portals to a vivid world beyond our knowledge. I love ritual African art for precisely these reasons. European traditions in art are glorious, but there are other ways of looking at the world. The theatre of primeval ritual art remembers and preserves the profound wonder and fear at the deepest level of being human. There is an elemental quality, a timelessness, that transports us to brazen intimacy with the unknown world. At times rude, crude, and ugly, such art does not turn away from the profound fears we harbour. At other times, it is impossibly elegant, paying sophisticated tribute to gifts the rest of us take for granted, gifts like motherhood or rain. Here in this room, we step away from the traffic and the noise and the sky high rises just metres away outside, and we find ourselves face to face with mystery. Us against the gods. We feel the beginning and the ending of time, and the eternity in between, come full circle. Lorette C. Luzajic The End of Painting (or Not)
Cats only have nine lives. Painting has had a few thousand. Every time its death is declared with resolute certainty, it lands again feet first, defying the doomsday hucksters who retreat once more with their tails between their legs. The proclamation that painting is dead couldn’t be more of a cliché. But the insistent persistence that drives such banal predictions is devout. Art’s every alternative incarnation is touted as a death blow to art’s very foundation, as if cumbersome, confusing audio-visual installations or pornographic performance “art” could ever usurp painting’s enchanted millennia. I vehemently disagree with my freethinking idol and intellectual elder, Camille Paglia, on this subject. In her book Glittering Images, she writes, “…With the heady proliferation of other mediums available to artists, the genre of painting has lost its primacy and authority. Yet for five hundred years after the dawn of the Renaissance, the most complex and personally expressive works of art ever produced in the world were executed in paint- from tempera and oil to acrylics. The decline of painting has cut aspiring artists off from their noblest lineage.” I beg to differ. I understand Paglia is lamenting the cultural and academic vogue given to lesser forms and the ignoble inanity of identity politics and shock value that passes for art these days. I share her pain. But no matter: these too shall pass. There has never been any real threat to painting, not even photography. The invention of photographic science understandably frightened artists. They had never had to put their history to the test. Legend quotes Paul Delaroche on the daguerreotype: “From today, painting is dead.” But instead of painting’s obituary, art exploded exponentially from the confines of its roles of representation. Photography as a craft, science, and art has been a super nova of human achievement, giving us the ability to preserve history and communicate to our peers and our future ancestors in ways even more dramatic than language and the written word. Indeed, its language was universal; it was able to show a person or an event or a place to everyone, regardless of their mother tongue. No translations necessary. But even so, instead of killing painting, photography expanded art’s reach and potential. Never before could so many people see so many paintings! Never before could the middle classes, and the poor, afford to look at so much art. People in South American could see works hanging in an Irish church or a French museum. Mass reproduction allowed all of us to look at Van Gogh and Raphael and Gerome, but also important was how painting changed paths. It began branching out onto countless roads less travelled. Church- and patron-commissioned subject matters and acceptable mores of art could no longer tether fancy’s flight, and where isms had changed only periodically throughout the centuries, now a cornucopia of them bloomed labyrinthine. There have been dozens of isms in every decade and every region of the world ever since. The very fact that photography could instantly create a likeness of a person, place, or object gave artists the freedom to experiment with paint, to invent and choose expressions that went beyond faithful reproduction. It’s hard for anyone alive today to think of the world without abstract art. Abstract painting might be the boldest contribution of photography to art. Perhaps there has been no movement or style in all of art history as popular, among both academicians and the market, not to mention the tastes of every ilk of enthusiast and aficionado. There are some who question how this form of painting, stripped of its requirements of technical draftsmanship, divested of all narrative, plundered of allegory and meaning, could grip the human imagination with such ferocity. But I would argue that this stark reductionism is the very reason that it has. The miraculous skills of rendering, the dense dictionary of context and history, were pared back to the bare bones of painting- nothing but the artist and the paint, nothing but the audience and the primal spell of magical colour that had always been there underneath the layers. Abstract is epic and infinite, it is big bang, it is random chaos, it is nothing but colour and visceral emotion. Its expression is more primal than even cave paintings and crude early sculptures of ceremony and invocation. All the bells and whistles are swept away and the artist and audience could return to the beginning, a beginning that had never been given form during the first several thousand years of art. Is it too much to compare abstract painting to the very dawn of creation, when darkness hovered over the face of the deep? I can see God in a beret, the first artist, swirling light without form from his magic wand of a brush. Cosmic glitter. I see him tossing the galaxies into the skies with the fervor of his loneliness and passion. I am not one of those artists who would argue that abstract art requires as much skill as a meticulously studied Michelangelo fresco or an impossibly lifelike Bernini sculpture of man’s anatomy from stone. It does not. I love abstract art, and it is harder than it looks. But abstract painting’s appeal is in its gestural instinctiveness, and its raw emotive power, not in its technical prowess. The simple evocation of beauty or ugliness is its own kind of truth. The wide appeal of abstract painting will never diminish the power of depictional art. But it could be said that the random combinations of blobs and swirls and drips and slashes bring us to the very heart of painting. Everybody is mesmerized by Jackson Pollock’s cacophonies of dripping paint, and everyone else loves the elegant immensity of Mark Rothko’s colour fields. I am strangely seduced by the duotone abstracts of the award winning South Korean-American artist Hyunmee Lee, which are really nothing but a hint of calligraphy and some paint slapped down. I find the work of contemporary American abstract painter Doug Trump even more compelling. He layers variegated gray washes over charcoal scribbles, brightened with occasional slashes of vibrant blue or school bus yellow. I cannot fully explain what is so appealing to me, but I feel like an archeologist digging through textures, discovering treasures hidden in the freeform shapes. The other gift of photography to painting, the one closest to my own heart, is collage. Of course collage has existed forever- assembling tidbits of flotsam and jetsam is as old as mosaic art, some 4000 years. Other streams of folk art and fine art gathered papers, and later print, to create new decorative forms. But collage could not really exist until the renewable or disposable image existed too. What images could a medieval peasant possibly tear up? Pictures were so precious that there was only one of each, and they were owned by churches or kings or the other 0.0001 percent. Only madmen and Calvinists dared destroy such rare markers of culture. What is still relatively underexplored is collage and painting together. There are a number of mixed media artists stunning the world with the beauty of their innovation, but the marriage of both worlds remains exceptional. Massimo Nota and Line Juhl Hansen come to mind. They are both creating gorgeous, unusual artwork. But “mixed media” as a whole is crafty and cute. This kitsch factor may account for the under-recognition of this art merger. But that will change. Collage in and of itself is still struggling for wide curatorial acceptance. Audiences and artists are equally delighted by unexpected juxtapositions, but academics are slow to acknowledge the vast possibilities of collage and mixed media. Even with Picasso and Braque credited as the inventors of modern collage, fear of complicated conservation, copyright, and questions of originality still stifle the progress of this form. The marriage of collage and painting is my own primary focus as an artist. I predict it will become more and more prominent as time goes by. Of course, in addition to the limitless potential of snipping up imagery and text and adding them to painted media, there is the fact that paint as a product has never been so widespread and so varied. Once upon a time, an artist would grind pigments from minerals and carefully combine a few precious colours with oil. Few could afford a broad palette. Colour mixing was its own art, of course, one that every artist should be serious about. But a restricted range of colours was matched by a very small selection of paints. Oils and egg tempera were all we had for centuries. Some ingenuity on the part of our predecessors meant mixing charcoals and ochres with animal fat to make some cave paint. Otherwise, oil and tempera were the mainstays. Each of these has a rich history, defined as much by their limitations as by their possibilities. Oil is the gold standard of painting. Its texture and tooth are unparalleled. It provides optimal blending options. Its scent is serious and sensual. Oil is durable enough to last, but fragile at first. It can take days, weeks, months, even years to dry. This wasn’t ideal for artists who travelled the desert or the northern bush to work in plein air. Masterpieces were easily destroyed before they were dry. Tempera is a classic method of mixing pigments, using the glutinous egg as binder. Their brilliance can be seen a thousand years later in early icon paintings. But tempera’s drawbacks were many. It was especially useful for icons and altarpieces because it had to be used on sturdy surfaces like wood, never paper or canvas. These were too flexible and meant the dried paint would flake off. Tempera also meant a precise style of working, in paper thin layers. Using impasto techniques or thick strokes was impossible because the paint only held up in thin, even washes. The Industrial Revolution meant pigments were ground en masse and the trend to paint interior walls began. During WW2, linseed oil shortages meant prohibitive costs, which spawned solutions like alkyd and polymer acrylics. The acrylic medium is barely half a century old, and has already birthed millions of works of art. Even so, its vast potential is barely tapped. Acrylic is staggeringly versatile. It can be as transparent and fine as gossamer, and it can be so thick it is sculptural. It can be cut and sanded and painted on top of. It can be mixed with anything from oil pastels to sand. Collage was hardly possible before acrylic, even with images that could be cut, because oil paint stains paper. Acrylic dries in minutes, giving a previously unknown immediacy to the work of painting. It is a special magic to those of us who love layers. Best of all, acrylic paint comes in thousands of colours, most of which were literally impossible before, no matter what mixing skills an artist possessed. It’s an “unnatural” medium which makes possible “unnatural” colours like neon pink and glow in the dark and pearl. The decades since the advent of acrylic paint have been filled with more painting than ever before in human history, a strange parallel for the art’s ongoing death knell. One Canadian artist who has defied the suggestion that he is himself for whom the bell tolls is Kim Dorland. This is the tenacity, the eternity, of painting- ten thousand years after its inception, Dorland reinvents painting. Inspired by Canadian icon Tom Thomson, Dorland is not content to mimic his master. Rather, he squeezes paint into sculpture, building thick, three-dimensional scenes out of tubes of oil. Indeed, his landmark exhibition at the McMichael was entitled, “You Are Here: Kim Dorland and the Return to Painting.” And there’s another irony, too, in all of this art of dying- there is yes, a return- a return to traditional painting like still life, portraiture, figurative, and landscape. Collagists, abstract artists, outsider painters, minimalists, maximalists, et al have shirked longstanding emphases on draftsmanship and perspective and the colour wheel to welcome the primacy of emotion, colour, texture, and experiential mucking. And this very expansion of painting has heralded in response a massive renaissance of traditional techniques and mastery. There is a veritable revival of classical, academic styles of painting. Still lifes have been dusted off, for example, breaking out of their stuffy reputation to bring their makers’ meticulous patience to the spotlight. Some contemporary still life painters rely on the tried and true apples or lemons or glass bottles; others have updated to donuts or ketchup bottles. And if “realism” was a given for centuries, regardless of changing subjects, the dance away from it has also yielded its hyperreal rebirth. Hyperrealism yearns to be more real than the real thing, more perfect than photography. You know it when you see it, because it’s impossible. Except that it’s not. The portrait and the figure have also witnessed a return to tradition, with life drawing classes all the rage in every urban centre. Many artists are again learning more about anatomy than medical students do, and sketching hands and feet and necks poised from every angle. I readily admit that I have realist envy, because my drawing skills are the least impressive in my bag of tricks. I’m enamoured with hyperrealism and still life works because of the skill and focus they are made with. I consider these artists to be magicians! They conjure up specters of people and objects. I also love old religious works, and the Academy painters with their fairy tale worlds of adventure and beauty. That said, my heart is where my own creative powers lie. I love the jumbling of juxtaposed ideas in mixed media collage painting. Combining various aesthetics creates powerful new ones. I feel a rush of emotion from larger than life abstracts where texture or colour take centre stage. There is a kind of a trance that comes from getting lost is the essence of paint, in a maze of images. And I also love photography and other gifts of new technologies. But they will never destroy the primacy of paint. Nor will the self-inflated, arrogant lot who print blots from barf or record audio of themselves on the toilet. Those who warble out tortured adjectives borrowed from French theory along with words like “parapraxis” and “intersectionality” can stop pretending they have special insights not available to the rest of us, reading into “challenging” works of garbage hauled from curbside. Yes, the current penchant to tout critical theory and postmodern analysis, to deconstruct until there’s nothing left, is a fashionable frenzy. But it will pass into oblivion, a wisp with memories no one could make heads or tails of, never mind pronounce. And more important trends like the discoveries of various new creative technologies won’t replace their predecessors. Like photography and collage, they will become their own things, latecomers in art history with a full future ahead to blossom in. Art’s very nature, however, will always be soaked in paint. Some of the predictions about the end come from earnest, excited young artists who are simply new and naive and absorb too readily the credos of their guides. They are to be forgiven. The others are to be laughed at: those swollen with the idea that their insights are so revolutionary. The real revolution has come and never gone. It is the magic spell woven over man, when he first discovered he could colour one thing with another. Lorette C. Luzajic |
The Ekphrastic Review
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April 2024
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