Kachō-ga*

The background is minimal, exactly as we wished when we planted the bed - only ivy, covering an old stone wall. The roses pop against its dark green curtain, and now, in late summer, sparrows flit among their sad, collapsing hearts.

just flown…
fluttering stem in a shower
of petals

Alan Peat

*The literal meaning of the Japanese term "Kachō-ga" is "birds and flowers’." It is also an important genre of Japanese art.

Alan Peat is an English writer. In 2021 he placed third in the International Golden Triangle Haiku contest & second in the New Zealand International Haiku contest. In 2022 he was runner up in the British Haiku Society Haibun Award; honourable mention in the Haiku Poets of North California International Haibun contest & second in the Sandford Goldstein international tanka contest. In 2022 he was a guest author at Cornell University’s Mann Library. The following year he won the inaugural HSA Touchstone Award for haibun. He has also written books about ceramics, textiles, and the art of John Tunnard.

Just a few spots left in the Ekphrastic Flash Fiction course ahead at Women on Writing!

Secure your spot today.

This is a five week course on writing flash fiction in response to visual art.

We'll be looking at how art can inspire story ideas, characters, setting and more. We'll be discussing amazing stories and writing our own. Feedback and one on one zoom consults as well.

See you there!
​
Link to Women on Wow for more info or to register:
https://www.wow-womenonwriting.com/classroom/LoretteLuzajic_EkphrasticFlashFiction.html

Woman Naps with Book
 
The woman looks nothing like the one who portrays her in brush strokes that reveal a skill not fully honed, this woman with a magenta flower tucked behind her ear. Looking at her sometimes I feel a sadness, but then I think, no, because the flower.

***

“Come to me,” she said, taking me in her arms after a long flight from Los Angeles to New York, a summer my father and I had come to visit. Me, a teenager, all straight dangling lines, she in middle age, round, plump and smelling of cured meat, but also a perfume of pastry. And although she looked like my father, it was his features in pale rather than his burnish. Her eyes were the same almond as his, as mine, but blue instead of the hazel he and I shared. Her skin was the white of a peeled pear against his warm olive. You could see, though, she was his sister. As she pulled me to her I felt her need to claim me, her only niece.
 
I’d met her once before, when my uncle was still alive. But that had been years before, when my father and I drove to a dude ranch outside Tucson to meet them. My cousin, her daughter, was there too. Maybe it was my fascination with her, a striking young woman, an accomplished writer I was told, confined to a wheelchair. Or it might have been my uncle’s presence, his strong drawn features, his gaze kind but solum as a predator bird. The patriarch. I could see how both women were tied to him. In that setting, my aunt was drawn in the background. 

These trips my father and I took were our way of sustaining what felt like, many times, an arranged relationship after my parents’ divorce. Both of us injured, our love retracted, my aunt’s arms around me at the door felt like coming in from our tempest. 
 
That night, after unpacking, she ushered us into a room of flowered walls and china plates piled with sliced cheeses and the mortadella and salami my father loved, the doting older sister. For dessert she presented two large tarts she’d made of glistening plum and apricot slices arranged in careful concentric circles. It was simple, it was pie, but like nothing I’d ever seen or tasted before.
 
“This is delicious, Aunt Frances."

“Anything for my favourite niece!”
 
One day of our visit she and I walked the shaded sidewalks of her Long Island neighbourhood to a Jewish delicatessen. On our way, I noticed her glance at me with a quiet look of satisfaction, and I realized, as I basked in her unearned adoration, that I felt it too.
 
“Two knishes, Irvin. My niece has never eaten one.” 

“You’re in for a treat young lady,” he said as he bagged up our food. 
 
Back in her kitchen she cut one of the pastries in half and handed me my plate. The crusty dough, velvety potatoes with a hint of mustard was a revelation, and I began to know my aunt in a way I could have never at that dude ranch. I saw how she and I were tied together. 
 
It has always been, my thankfulness for the scent of a pot simmering, for the satin of cream, the savor of this element of our survival. Made with hands, the more hand-made the better. But it’s also remembering that melody filtering down the street, the ice cream truck’s arrival and that banana popsicle on a warm day. All the ways food transcends to more than necessity I see through a window of divinity that isn’t merely evidenced in the symmetry, colour, sound, and scent in the world, (where did it come from?) but that we see it, we hear it, we taste it, we want it.
 
And so for the rest of our stay in New York my aunt delivered a succession of her artistry, her meatballs and gravy, her pizza, her Shrimps Dejonge. Some days I would stand beside her and watch her able hands with the dough or the knife, and I saw how she considered it all an event, an opus from her kitchen. Later in the evenings, she poured cups of spicy Constant Comment tea we sipped from dainty cups served with biscotti while watching Johnny Carson.
 
On that visit, beneath her joy, I saw a grief,  I sensed it wasn’t just my uncle’s recent death, but how things were adding up. My cousin’s polio was one of the last reported in their county, the vaccine came soon after, although my aunt never uttered a word of pity. 

***

East 11th street, New York City, 1925, when and where my grandmother realized the name she’d given her daughter was too much for a young girl to take to school. Too much for the child of Sicilian immigrants who muddled together a life in tenement housing. I think of a puzzled young Alfonsina, having grown accustomed to the sound of her place in the world, attaching herself to those vowels and consonants when they rang out, being told she would now be Frances, the anglicized version of her mother’s Francesca. Maybe this and her fair skin would save her from the slurs of Dego, Wop. 
 
When my aunt met and married my uncle Sal, who became a successful building contractor, she pulled herself from ugly streets to soft green lawns and rooms set aside for dining. To a life as the cultivated person instead of the bleakness she was born into.

***

The woman in the painting reclines, sleeping on a coverlet of rich rust, a tender repose of pale skin, blushed cheeks, and garnet lips. She rests so as not to disturb the billowing flower in her dark hair. Before her, a book lies open, the pages coloured a rosy hue, as if the words are haloed in some essence from beyond. Gazing on her I feel her quietude, I know it. Deep in her story, far from her own, she has drifted off, blissfully away from the vicissitudes of her waking hours.

***

After New York my aunt and I became pen pals, and I began to look forward to the envelopes addressed to me in her tight cursive and distinct flourishes, “Dear Gina, I’m sending this recipe for my Blueberry Buckle. Everyone in the office loves it.”
 
She worked for years at Macy’s flagship store in Manhattan,  a position in management, although I never knew exactly what. It was important enough, though, that she met some interesting people. In one of her many shipments to me of books that began arriving in later years was the signed first edition of The Plaza Cookbook by historian Eve Brown,  Dear Frances, Bon Appetit, Affectionately, Eve. 
 
During her time there, when I was very young, before we’d ever met, she sent a doll from the store. Over a foot tall, she was outfitted in a royal blue dress with a double-breasted red coat. Dark curls trailed down her porcelain face, flowed to her shoulders, and was topped with a black felt hat, an uptown girl. This gift from a distant relative, a doll I would not snuggle as my pretend baby but place on a shelf and admire for her elegance, hinted of the woman who’d given it, a lover of beauty, a creature of aspirations.
 
A few years after the visit to New York my aunt announced she was moving to Tucson. Her doctors advised that her terrible allergies would do better away from the spoors that hung in the humid summers of Long Island. In this decision she left her son and daughter-in-law, her daughter, and the only state that had ever been home.  A while later, she sent a picture of herself. In it she’s wearing a flowing caftan dress, lounging on a sofa, her strawberry blond hair now styled high, she several pounds lighter, her big eyes popping from eyeliner. Not long after she married. 
 
Ben was a pharmacist, a widow, and like my uncle before him, handsome and reputable. My aunt moved into his flat-roofed stuccoed home and the two of them began to travel. A fat gold photo album given to me after she died is filled with pictures of Europe, along with my aunt's little notes accompanying them. Is there anywhere as glorious as Rome? 
 
In Arizona, she took up painting, and her growing portfolio was comprised mostly of landscapes and still life, but she also ventured into portraiture. One of them, a glamorous woman, a Spanish Doña, gifted to my father and my step-mother, hung in their living room for years. 
 
During this period, each summer, she and Ben took a cottage on the north shore of Lake Tahoe where I happened to be living at the time. While she was there, we’d visit often. Some days she would produce a miracle out of her small kitchen for our dinner and others we’d go to a restaurant in town. Ben was a nice man, friendly but a little fussy. Many days he was off golfing while my aunt painted by the water’s edge. We’d sit in Adirondacks where she spoke to me now as one woman to another. 
 
“He ignores me. I can’t bear it.” 

“What are you going to do?” 

She looked at me as if she was considering what that might be. 
 
The subject never came up again, and several years later Ben suddenly died. No matter her confessions to me, I saw how his passing jolted her. In her flat-roofed home in the desert her world was now smaller, and then more tragically so when a few years later her daughter also died. 
 
This loss, I knew, was the deepest. Not simply because it was her child, but was the unnatural end of a frayed yet enduring relationship. One that broke both their hearts. For all the unconditional love my aunt bestowed on me, she held her own children to standards, expectations. Many of which my cousin never met as she faced life with her disability. My aunt  could only see the world from where she stood, a place where ill-fate was a test, a measurement of fortitude, of imagination. I knew she loved her daughter with the passion of any parent, but she also dug into her positions. So, as is often the case, when you continue with your imperfect love, as love always is in degrees, thinking of the day it will be made right, you are stunned when there are no more.
 
About once a year I came to visit, and, by then, bring my own family. She would take my kids in her arms and hold them with the same cherish she had me when I was a girl, and even in encroaching age, she spared no effort to do has she’d always done, feed us in spectacular fashion. 
 
On one of my last visits I came alone. I remember walking through the back porch door into the kitchen and seeing the counters overflowing with cans and bags of food, as if she was expecting a crowd any day, although it was clear she was no longer cooking. She’d also stopped painting, yet her little studio was filled with paints and canvases. Her television room bulged with piles of CDs and DVDs of movies and the operas she loved so well, many of them unopened. I saw how she was slipping away, how that part of her that had clung to life’s lusciousness and small graces had been silenced in a dark melancholy. It wasn’t long after my last visit to her in a residential care home that she passed. Her estate had been liquidated but her custodian held back some of her paintings for me. 
 
The woman napping hangs over a dresser in my bedroom. Her presence a given in my back in forth, my in and out. She resides close to where I might find myself in a mirror image. And when I stop to gaze at her, so tender in this deliverance, I sense the artist close by. I detect her sweet scent and hear her say,  for you, my favourite niece.

***

The woman in the painting has years before her, full lips, eyes without a crease, angles sharp. I imagine she has reached the point in the pages where her heroine has come to a field of tall grasses, an escape of sorts, a place of respite. She has left some torment behind. She sits in the caress of that green and soft breeze. Under a sky of blue, she cups a flower. Before drifting off, the woman in the painting is suspended in that field in bloom, warmed by the sun, wrapped in  flush of colour and soft perfume.
 
Gina Harlow

Gina Harlow is a writer living in Southern California. Her essays and poetry have appeared in Narratively, HerStry, Austin Statesman, The Hunger, and elsewhere. She is a nonfiction reader for Third Street Review and her work in progress is a long story about a young horse. Links to most of her writings can be found at www.ginaharlowwrites.com

 

​Join us for the epic event of the year.
You won't be sorry. It is wild, exhilarating, exhausting and wonderful.
A day of pure creation. Play. Brainstorming. 
​Join us on Sunday, or do it on your own time over the following weeks.
This year, to celebrate ten years of The Ekphrastic Review, an optional Champagne Party follows the marathon on zoom.
Details are below.

Perfect Ten: an Ekphrastic Marathon
 
Try something intense and unusual- an ekphrastic marathon, celebrating ten years of The Ekphrastic Review. 
 
Join us on Sunday, July 13 2025 for our  annual ekphrastic marathon. This year we are celebrating ten years!!!!!

This is an all -day creative writing event that we do independently, together.

Take the plunge and see what happens!
 
Write to fourteen different prompts, poetry or flash fiction, in thirty minute drafts. There will be a wide variety of visual art prompts posted at the start of the marathon. You will choose a new one every 30 minutes and try writing a draft, just to see what you can create when pushed outside of your comfort zone.
 
We will gather in a specially created Facebook page for prompts, to chat with each other, and support each other. 
 
Time zone or date conflicts? No problem. Page will stay open afterwards. Participate when you can, before the deadline for submission. The honour system is in effect- thirty minute drafts per prompt, fourteen prompts. Participants can do the eight hour marathon in one or two sessions at another time and date within the deadline for submissions (July 31, 2025). 
 
Polish and edit your best pieces later, then submit five for possible publication on the Ekphrastic site.
 
One poem and one flash fiction will win $100 CAD each.
 
Last year this event was a smashing success with hundreds of poems and stories written. Let's smash last year out of the park and do it even better this year!
 
Marathon: Sunday July 13, from 10 am to 6 pm EST (including breaks)
(For those who can’t make it during those times, any hours that work for you are fine. For those who can’t join us on July 13, catch up at a better time for you in one or two sessions only, as outlined above.)

Champagne Party: at 6.05 pm until 7. 30 on Sunday, July 13, join participants on Zoom to celebrate an exhilarating day. Bring Champagne, wine, or a pot of tea. We'll have words from The Ekphrastic Review, conversation as a chance to connect with community, and some optional readings from your work in the marathon.   
 
Story and poetry deadline: July 31, 2025
Up to five works of poetry or flash fiction or a mix, works started during marathon and polished later. 500 words max, per piece. Please include a brief bio, 75 words or less
 
Participation is $20 CAD (approx. 15 USD). Thank you very much for your support of the operations, maintenance, and promotion of The Ekphrastic Review, and the prizes to winning authors.

If you are in hardship and cannot afford the entry, but you want to participate, please drop us a line at [email protected] and we'll sign you up. 
​
Selections for showcase and winning entries announced sometime in September.

​Sign up below!

View Untitled One through Six (the Green Paintings), by Cy Twombly (USA) 1986 at 2.06. These are the works that inspired this sequence of poems.


Giornata:  Cy Twombly's Green Paintings (I-VI)
 
I never really separated painting and literature.
Cy Twombly
     
But here is a painter who has a poetic sensibility....
Octavio Paz
 
I
 
after Untitled 1 (the Green Paintings), by Cy Twombly (USA) 1986
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/700460
 
Green acrylic slathered on, and two quick smears
of white piled heavy at the top and fingered
downwards, thinning as it goes through the green
and onto the frame.
                                     It’s no silver cataract
in a verdant jungle somewhere, no sucking 
Charybdis loose in the gallery; it doesn’t
mean anything.
                             It just stands there on the wall.
Brush strokes show through, and the long lines of drip,
and the little places where the paint runs onto
the bottom frame.
                                  You can feel it reaching
for blood connection, seeking out its own kind.    
  
II
 
after Untitled 2 (the Green Paintings), by Cy Twombly (USA) 1986
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/700462

He’d stepped away from the first green painting,
prepared another, a darker green and a thicker one,
and mixed white into the still wet background
to make a paler patch.
                                           We will need different
words, I think, to circumscribe this bigger glob
coming down from the upper right, its tiny
white fixtures fastened to the upper frame.
It’s not enough, you know, just describing
things in general, like the shapes the white paint twists
itself into, or the stringy pale drippings 
racing down to the green-drizzled bottom frame.
 
III
 
after Untitled 3 (the Green Paintings), by Cy Twombly (USA) 1986
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/700463

A rainstorm coming slowly off the Rockies, 
or jellyfish drifting in green water,  
                                                    Klecksographien
cloud faces of a dream world.
                                                      Iridescent 
white is thicker now, its dripping more profuse.
Did he pause right there to watch the rivulets 
run down, or was he already thinking 
back to the first painting (or ahead to the next
bare plywood) making those adjustments that were 
piling up now in his mind?
                                                 A circus tumbler
doing a three-ball cascade twirls at his work,
with the phosphorescent rains descending.
  
IV
 
after Untitled 4 (the Green Paintings), by Cy Twombly (USA) 1986
 https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/700464

It’s the weight of the white thing now, pulling it
down, while a green current dissipates pieces of it 
being broken off.
                                The green is a dark river,
say, or la mar profondo, and the white electric
angler-fish swim through misted trails of light
(and still the paint runs down onto the margins).
Clouds, soap bubbles, misted mirrors, white dung
thrown at a wall, things that can’t hang on for long.
When the green sea reflects itself, the layers
spell depth or distance, receding shadows
wave in the ebb and flow like laminaria. 
 
V
 
after Untitled 5 (the Green Paintings), by Cy Twombly (USA) 1986
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/700465

Look there!  That’s one of the places where he spread
the paint with his fingers. See how it swirls,
like a de Kooning! 
                                 It’s twisting in ribbons of paint.
You sense Twombly’s presence now,  the random daubings
of thick white paint, spread on and then pushed along
(it’s said) with a stick, dragged to the porous bottom,
all the way to the frame.
                                            It’s in motion!
The drip marks on the frame? They’re like threads
stitching the green waters, like guy wires
running to stakes driven into the wall.
And still it waves and quivers and wiggles. 

VI
 
after Untitled 6 (the Green Paintings), by Cy Twombly (USA) 1986
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/700466

Pyrotechnique! Feu d'artifice! O Apogee!
Come at last to the very last, and turn around, 
do-se-do and a right left grand! 
                                                          Promenade!
These green things go in a line, he’s running up 
and down, scratching adjustments here and there 
until we grasp him in these green crescendos, 
rising and falling in his lissome turns, nearly
filling up the picture.
                                       When the rockets blow
white! O White streaks! When the rockets blow silver
into a star and it rains down onto the frame.
The artist takes it all in, striding up and down. 
 
Charles Tarlton
 
Charles Tarlton is a poet living in Old Saybrook, Connecticut with his wife, Ann Knickerbocker, an abstract painter, and their two standard poodles, Nikki and Jesse. His poemd have appeared in 84 journals, including The Ekphrastic Review, Ink, Sweat, and Tears, Rattle, Blackbox Manifold,  MacQueen’s Quinterly (ands KYSO Flash), Ilanot Review (Israel), London Grip (UK), The Journal (UK), Innisfree Poetry Journal (Eire). In addition, he has published seven print collections and four chapbooks of his poetry and ekphrasis.
 

Where the Selves Commune: Hammershøi’s Rooms
​
...monotony can be the very expression of something beautiful. … the predicates applicable to married love. … faithful, constant, humble, patient, forbearing, sincere, contented, observant, persistent, willing, joyful. … have the property of being inward specifications of the individual … their truths consist in applying … all the time. And nothing else is acquired … just the self. … healthy love … has quite another idea of time and of the meaning of repetition. 
Kierkegaard, “The Aesthetic Validity of Marriage,” Either/Or. II. 
 
Let’s start a la Kierkegaard by what Vilhelm Hammershøi is close to but is not.

The air and everything ephemeral have been sucked out, as in Piero, but none of what is seen is the "eternal;" the scenes are domestic as in Vermeer, and indeed the French press referred to him as the “Vermeer of the North,” but his sombre palette marks a clear contrast with the Dutch’s use of “bright colours, expensive pigments... and natural warm light.” (Harris 2013) 

The mystery of what his rooms mean is not alluded by obvious symbols. Maybe the urban solitude of Hopper’s boarding houses and cafes; even closer, Morandi’s variations of vases and bottles, the infinite in slight changes. 

But let’s proceed with his typical calmness, for ever since I get close to his paintings, I am given a sense of privacy, of letting me be, and move around. It was the impression I had when I first saw his paintings, I guess it was Portrait of a Young Woman: I "knew" he was a Northern European, maybe Dutch or German, or the Baltic, a "cousin" of Caspar David Friedrich.

Now, let’s start with what is obvious and see it afresh: his palette restricted to subdued colours “umber, sienna, brown, black, and white” (Harris), like in Interior. An Old Stove, or the depleted yellow, the grey, the pale blue, master a “sophisticated technique of thinly brushed paint, through which emerges the canvas grain”, managing to render alive a sheen of light glittering amid the half-tones.” (Simon 2008)

Perhaps, the real influence is of James McNeill Whistler, as Hammershoi painted several portraits of his mother and his sister Anna based on Whistler’s Arrangement in Grey and Black (Harris 2013), executing “a study in tonality rather than in light and colour”. Indeed, Hammershoi subsequently exhibited alongside Whistler in the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1889, and visited London in 1897-98 to follow in the master’s footsteps.” (Simon 2008)

For most works, however, one has to ask: where’s everybody?

As his oeuvre comprises depopulated cityscapes and landscapes, and most famously, interiors, “fully one-third of Hammershøi’s output of 370 paintings” (Harris), which typically feature sparse furnishings, empty rooms, or solitary figures seen from behind, such as his wife Ida, often depicted with her back to the viewer.

And yet, one feels a mutual relation from how painter and subject place themselves, one Alsdorf (2016) described with Kierkegaard’s ideas about the transcendence in the everyday, in the repetition, in the paradox of intimacy and inaccessibility in marriage: there’s a sense of trust in how the "settee" will convey what she wants. 

But there’s no psychologism, no descent in the maelstrom of the soul: the letters she reads, the sewing is what one does when one is not looked at. 

However, these interiors are “not an image of tranquil domesticity but a carefully constructed product of the artist’s imagination”: Interior with Young Woman Seen from the Back. Strandgade 30 (1909) is “an exercise in which the figure,"Scales (2003) wrote "seems to have stopped in her tracks, a carefully arranged component in an aesthetic ensemble.” On that same work, Alsdorf observed how “Hammershøi extends the gray vertical line marking the wooden spine of the window’s left panes past the windowsill... connecting the window directly to its interior reflection on the floor."

There’s a “geometric rigour” everywhere, in doorframes, window-frames, picture frames, square parts of chairs, in the shadows of windows against the wall, where the sofa is sculpted like an altar, with two white chairs on either side. (Sunshine in the Drawing Room III)

There, as in all other paintings, from the framing and refracted on other surfaces – the polished tables, the quirky three-legged pianos – the light emerges in a “tightly contained psychological tension” (Sloan 2008), a sort of in-stasis, the illuminated attention to what appears. 

And what is noticed need not be "something’," in fact it might well be Sunbeams or Sunshine (1900) or Dust Motes. It is quite obvious, to me at least, how the shadow of the windowpanes across the floor reveal the true characters of his paintings: light and space, the former acquiring or "losing" volume in the latter, while this one is till material but lighter. 

With this “shifting light – for example, in The Balcony Room at Spurveskjul (1911) - H[ammershoi] depicts the boundary between reality and illusion, seeing and not seeing … grasping something immaterial and intangible and consolidating it in paint.” (Sjarel Ex 2015)

And yet, the objects visible in this light - the china, the pianos, the clocks, the stoves – create a specific emotional atmosphere without narrative content. Indeed, when Hammershoi submitted Portrait of a Young Woman (1885) to the Danish Royal Academy, it failed to win the prestigious Neuhaus Prize, because of its “subdued colour, lack of finish and unclear perspective.” (Sloan 2008) 

Not only were the empty interiors deemed purposeless; they seemed “deliberately drained” of story-telling. (Simon 2008)

This lack was “[M]ost striking and unsettling”, constantly subverting “the viewer’s expectations creates a sense of disquiet and causes the viewer to emotionally turn back into himself or herself.” (Harris)

This absence of events, described as “the Poetry of Silence,” is what Krämer (2013) calls Verschlossenheit, "taciturnity," “an inward-looking, hermetic approach, is characteristic of much symbolist art.”

If "nothing" is happening, the compounded effect of architectural composition and sparse interiors, devoid of figures, leads us ask: what are we supposed to be feeling? 

Repeatedly painting and slightly varying the same rooms, windows looking onto other windows, the curved rails along deserted streets, does create a sense of both familiarity and estrangement, a disquiet the Danish critic Karl Madsen diagnosed as "neurasthenia." (Harris)

Yet, we the viewers should not forget we might have projected this disquiet onto that "absence," the silence of the ordinary inner lives of the others. 

If one just stops at what is in front of oneself, then the paradox of intimacy and inaccessibility, of the ineffable of the ordinariness Kierkegaard wrote about - and Hammershoi read – makes obvious another  absence: there’s no bourgeois performance of "natural" domesticity; these sparsely furnished rooms may embody what Hugues Choplin (2023) described as an "art of the common," distant from both sentimentalist mundanity and the obvious metaphysics of Symbolism. 

Sloan did note Hammershoi’s relationship with Belgian Symbolists, “particularly Xavier Mellery, whose concern with the 'secret life of things,' monochrome palette and brooding silences display a strong kinship with Hammershøi”, though the Danish operated with such an economy of means and meanings, “barely intimated beneath a deceptively calm surface.”

Harri Mäcklin has persuasively interpreted Hammershoi’s restraint with Levinas’ phenomenology of the "il-y-a," the "there is," how the light coming through his opaque windows is similar to the detached presence one experiences in an insomniac state, wandering in the labyrinth the apartment has become, almost hinting at Robbe Grillet’s hypnotic repetition.

“Emptied of all unnecessary detail the mundane realities of domestic life in Copenhagen, around 1900 … the paintings are imbued with a stillness and sense of introspection simultaneously melancholy and eerie”, as Sloan remarked, or even causing a "visual irritation" (Krämer) with the unsettling composition of View of the Old Asiatic Company, a grey sky over empty Baroque buildings. 

It shouldn’t surprise, therefore, how, after his death in 1916, Hammershoi’s reputation declined dramatically: his paintings were, indeed, unsettling, but their “quiet simplicity did not chime with the restless experimentation of early twentieth-century art”, so much that, by 1931, the Copenhagen Statens Kunst Museum disbanded its Hammershøi room and returned all works to their lender. (Krämer)

Even Hammershoi’s revival had to first undergo the critical misrepresentation by Danish writer Poul Vad as a painter “entirely unaffected by contemporary artistic developments.”
 
Only through international exhibitions and scholarly reassessment, was H being rediscovered:  scholars like Kirk Varnedoe, Emily Braun, and Robert Rosenblum “corrected Vad’s thesis, so that the artist could be seen in relation to his international peers” (Krämer).

His resurgence in terms of critical appreciation (a “flagship of Danish art”), high prices (The Music Room commanded $ 9m at Sotheby’s) and acquisitions and exhibitions by major museums (London National Gallery, Berlin Alte Nationalgalerie, Frankfurt Städel Museum; the MoMa, and Rotterdam Boijmans Van Beuningen), reflects “a wider rethinking of the development of early ‘modern’ art”, marked by “existential isolation, stillness, melancholy” as its clearest signs. (Krämer)

Hammershoi’s appeal for the modern viewer now lies in how this angst does “remain self-sufficient and ultimately impenetrable.” (Simon) 

I find some validity coming from Kierkegaard’s Sickness unto Death and The Concept of Anxiety: the infinite possibilities of our modern life have left it and us adrift, blinded by the shining but always-receding certainty that the next object, the next body, the next holiday will somehow give us peace. 
In this perspective, H’s approach is said to “anticipate the isolated world created by Edward Hopper” (Harris). Both painters deal with “psychic alienation, a sense of supreme aloneness in a world suffused with melancholy.” (Budick 2016)

And yet, there’s a certain disconnection between the aesthetic deluge of possibilities Kierkegaard examined and rejected and the sparseness, the austerity we see Hammershoi portrayed.

First of all, one may describe the pure appearance of what is not there, the empty spaces, the absence of events as the removal of words, of actions in excess, of their meaninglessness, of “the comfort of despairing … which permeates modern lyric both in verse and in prose … in case such a monotony were unavoidable in conjugal life … the task would be … to preserve love in and through it, and not to despair, for despair can never be a serious task; it is a convenience”.  (Kierkegaard, Either/Or)

But I cannot find convenience or comfort, in the sense we have come to associate with these words; there’s nothing trivial, uncommitted, half-hearted in Hammershoi.
 
Above all, to identify what Hammershoi depicts with what he "meant" is to revert to a medieval expectation a modern painting must be a cypher of, if not an allegory by the painter, and not an ambiguous communication we viewers establish on our terms with the subject and the painter. 

In this perspective, the light and the space frames reveal how Hammershoi challenged the viewer’s expectation about the transparency of the subject, its being intelligible for anyone, that is, to none, emphasizing instead the tension between representation and abstraction.  

The semi-transparent curtains and diffuse light make the viewer aware of the act of seeing itself, merging the interior of the painting and the exterior that light alludes to into a single surface, creating a tension between representational and non-representational elements. (Hemkendreis 2015) 

Thinking or even feeling that the despair is "there" impoverishes how those forms, those objects, their very ordinariness has been made visible again.

Hammershoi resisted the identification, the emotional connection between the viewer and the exterior, laying forth, instead, the awareness of the viewer to the act of perceiving, the ambiguity of interiority, as in Sleeping Room. (Hemkendreis)

His distinctive artistic vision characterized by restraint, psychological depth, and an attention that stands still but is not passive continues to resonate with viewers today for the quiet ambiguity emerging with an economy of ordinary means, and in that ambiguity, the viewers may also seek a muted, subdued representation of peace. One has to get closer to hear it, not because it is whispering, but to pay attention, which is a form of peace itself.
 
Massimiliano Nastri

Massimiliano Nastri grew up in a German-speaking village, up on the Italian Alps, but was born in the south of Italy, Naples, in 1973. He has been living in Ireland, north and south, since 2006, doing different jobs and eventually, getting his last PhD at Queen’s University, Belfast, where he worked as a teaching assistant. He is revising his PhD thesis on the interwar collapse of centre-right parties and the rise of fascism. He has written an unpublished political novel, and is working on another. His interest in art focuses on characters such as Sironi, Grosz, and Ben Shahn.

Bridget Alsdorf, “Hammershøi’s Either/Or”, Critical Inquiry, Winter 2016, Vol. 42, No. 2, pp. 268-305.
Ariella Budick, “Painting Tranquillity: Masterworks by Vilhelm Hammershøi, Scandinavia House, New York -’Wistful and sublime’“. FT.com. 2016

Hugues Choplin, “Un silence sans ambiance. Hammershøi, les impressionnistes et le tournant atmosphérique contemporain”, Ambiances Environnement sensible, architecture et espace urbain, 2023.

Sjarel Ex, “A study by Vilhelm Hammershøi acquired by Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam”, The Burlington Magazine, 2015, 157(1343), 97-98.

James C. Harris, “Interior. With Piano and Woman in Black (Strandgade 30)”, JAMA Psychiatry, 2013, 70(8), 774-775. 

Anne Hemkendreis, “Inner and Outer Realms: Opaque Windows in Vilhelm Hammershøi’s Interior Paintings”, in Interiors and Interiority. Edited by Ewa Lajer-Burcharth and Beate Söntgen. Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2015.

Søren Kierkegaard, “The Aesthetic Validity of Marriage”, Either/Or. II. Translated by Alastair Hannay. Penguin Book 2004.

Felix Krämer, “The rediscovery of Vilhelm Hammershøi: two recent acquisitions in New York and Frankfurt”, The Burlington Magazine, 2013, 155(1319), 95-97.

Harri Mäcklin, “How to Paint Nothing? Pictorial Depiction of Levinasian il y a in Vilhelm Hammershøi’s Interior Paintings”, Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology, 2018, 5:1, 15-29.

Alette Rye Scales, “Vilhelm Hammershøi. Hamburg. The Burlington Magazine, 2003, 145(1203), 473-474.

Robin Simon, “Poetry without motion”. New Statesman, 23 June 2008, Vol. 137, Fasc. 4902, 38-40.
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Rachel Sloan, “Vilhelm Hammershøi. London and Tokyo. The Burlington Magazine, 2008, 150 (1266), 624-625.
 

At the Edge of the Amazon
 
 
after Orchids and Hummingbird by Martin Johnson Heade
 
Now, this is peace:
In southern Brazil, storm clouds
part like curtains in a dark room,
revealing unbroken sky beyond. 
Suddenly the world below is brighter, 
distant mountains visible, the tree canopy
rolling in chartreuse waves, 
the five-fingered leaves of kapoks
and trefoils of rubber trees holding still.
Not even a breeze rustles them.
 
It’s so still that you barely notice
the ivy enrobing the closest branch,
its thin, climbing tendrils bursting
with emerald hearts. It’s so still
that two cattleya orchids, twins
with bone-white petals and frilled
fuchsia skirts for labellums, look back
at you inquisitively. So still that a male
Brazilian ruby remains perched and at rest,
his throat’s jewellescent patch the same color
as the orchid tongues he’ll soon drink from.
 
What is not peace
is the place another hummingbird calls home
two centuries later and half a country away.
At the edge of the Amazon, he scurries about, 
seeking flowers to feed from and finding few.
Trees he used to roost in have been cut down,
felled on scorched soil.
 
Some days, flames lash out for his tail feathers,
ravenous and wild. Thick smoke obscures
his vision. Where orchids, monkey brush,
and heliconia once grew is now
charred black, or browned with dying.
Yes, it will all green over again someday,
but as grass for farmers and cattle,
things not of this rainforest.
 
The hummingbird does not know this.
He only knows there are fewer branches
to give him respite, fewer blossoms
to sate his hunger. Whenever he lands
on an orchid, the flower’s expression
is open and tilted, the face of a curious child
who repeats the question that neither human
nor animal is prepared to answer: 
What will happen to the hummingbird
if all the flowers disappear?
​
Sara Letourneau

Sara Letourneau is the author of Wild Gardens (Kelsay Books, 2024). She’s also a book editor and writing coach at Heart of the Story Editorial & Coaching Services; the cofounder and cohost of the Pour Me a Poem open mic in Mansfield, Massachusetts; and the co-editor of the Pour Me a Poem anthology. Her poetry has won the 2023 Beals Prize for Poetry and the Blue Institute’s 2020 Words on Water contest. Some of her recent work can be found in Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Nixes Mate Review, Silver Birch Press, and Third Wednesday Magazine.

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