Gorky as Naturalist? by Simon Parker

Gorky as Naturalist?

Nature took on a violent dimension. What had been looked at before and loved was changed. Thorns became sharper, knots and burrs more savage. Sinister. Nature was a dangerous beast, unruly, merciless in its running of the environment. Its terrifying aspect had been hidden but now, now that his eyes had been opened through illness and abandonment, through the irrepressible surge of memory, it seethed. This disturbance, this change, brought his painting to gloomier realms. Colours darkened, brushwork became more snatched and jagged, shapes were crueler, edges able to cut. He could not stop looking. Looking, searching, yearning: what he had always done. Looking now transformed. It was no longer the intrigued and joyous taking in of the world. He could see horrors. The horrors nature brandished, the horrors staining his past. Terrible things he had witnessed, brutal and bloody acts that man perpetrates on man, were now ringing out in the plants, the bushes and the trees he saw before him. This world knows no mercy. Any care that surfaces is arbitrary, temporary and inevitably destroyed. We are all ripe for destruction. His days were a wading through this. Trudge. Terror. Trudge. First the looking, then the holding of the images, then the transformation, images into painting. The worst was looking back, staring at the picture. Again, again the horror. A horror which he had created and could not bear to look into or away from. Drawing, painting had always lifted him from misery, now it held him there, bound him to a pitiless and brute existence. His hands slowed. Each act took longer, delaying any arrival that admitted he was just another player in this abominable tragedy. To paint or not to paint? There was no question that he would ever stop if he was alive. The question was, whether he could bare to stay alive in a world where all love seemed lost.

Simon Parker

Simon is a London based writer, performer and teacher. His work has been published in The Pomegranate London, The Ekphrastic Review, shortlisted by the BBC and was a finalist for the Galtelli Literary Prize. Simon is an associate artist of Vocal Point Theatre, a theatre company dedicated to telling stories from those not often heard, and providing workshops for the marginalised. He also runs creative writing and reading groups for the homeless, socially excluded and vulnerable. For more info go to https://www.simonparkerwriter.com