Why (not) tell?
Answering a challenge
We all know them: social media challenges that ask you to post a series of book covers, black-and-white photographs from your everyday life, or any other series of images. Typically the description goes: no titles, no comments, no stories. Just the image.
I was invited to a ten-day art challenge by an illustrator I know and appreciate: ten images of visual arts (paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures…) and, surely: only the image, no comments or stories.
I found myself hesitating. Could I come up with enough items of visual art that had really — I mean really — touched me, for some reason?
And, more importantly, why couldn’t I tell other people what they meant to me?
In what I write, how I talk and how I live, I tend to explain things. Too much, too often, perhaps. Third generation teacher genes, what do you want? This is just the way I function.
I saw some of my acquaintances playing along with similar social media challenges, and every time I saw one of their posts pop up on my timeline, I caught myself thinking: ‘Yeah, right, this must mean something to you. But I haven’t got a clue what this is about, so in what way can this possibly become an enriching experience for me, if you won’t tell me how this particular thing affected you?’
Other people’s stories can distract you from your personal experience, a friend told me. In the case of book covers, I think that’s utterly beside the point. I want to know what the story is about and why it ripped you apart, dammit. If you make the effort to post it on FB, do have the guts to tell us why, too. But in the case of visual art work, okay, I am willing to accept that argument and go along with it. Up to a point.
That’s why I have decided to write a blog post — a long one, sorry — that combines both approaches.
Below, I will post the ten images I shared for the FB challenge, without any comments. If the visual inspiration, unsullied by my personal musings, is all you wish to experience: enjoy! And then stop reading.
For below that, I will post them again, one by one, along with some of the story that got me to choose them.
My deepest roots
I have loved stories about our prehistoric ancestors ever since I visited the caves of Furfooz (Belgium) as a young child. There is no art on the walls there, but the ghosts of the cave dwellers are very much alive. And they have never left me again.
Prehistoric art is one of my deepest roots, my oldest loves. We were never any closer to the beating heart of the living earth than we were then.
Choose your story
I love the darkness. Perhaps because so many other people prefer the light. I am convinced the dark holds treasures, frightening perhaps, but vital ones. I was a follower of Jung before I knew he ever lived.
A very remarkable figure in the dynamic and fragile balance between light and darkness, loved and loathed, cherished and feared, is the Egyptian deity Seth/Set.
He symbolized the roughness of the desert, its (in)fertility, and chaos. Where Horus (the Elder) was day, he was night. Together, the performed a dance neither one of them could of should win, by which the kept the world in alignment. Until the old tales were rewritten and suddenly stories had to talk of Good and Evil.
Stories are relative.
And in this one, I side with the Darkness.
Beathing freely
I have a deep attraction for all things Celtic, Scandinavian, Viking and old Anglo-Saxon. If such a thing as reincarnation exists, this is where my roots lie. A part of me expands to a place of breath and complete freedom when I connect to the old northern cultures.
The intricate beauty of these designs never ceases to amaze me. Over a decade ago, I bought my first bound notebook from the Paper Blanks series, simply because I loved it so much. I didn’t have a use for it. Soon, it turned into some sort of spiritual diary, which turned into a real, personal diary over time.
I am writing in other notebooks but the Paper Blanks’ nowadays, but my diary has grown into an essential part of my daily life. And these images is where it started.
But I want to tell you the beautiful tale…
A beautifully illuminated version of the medieval Beatrijs manuscipt, that tells the story of a woman who abandons the convent to be with her lover, and, decades later, returns there full of remorse. Her absence has gone unnoticed, for the Virgin Mary, to whom she had ever prayed faithfully, had taken her place in the years she was gone.
The anonymous poet of the text starts this beautiful story with a verse that has become renowned in Dutch literature:
Writing poetry brings me little profit. People tell me to leave it be, and not waste my energy on it. But I want to tell you the beautiful tale of the virgin, who is both mother and kin…
A classic, and one of those instances in which visual arts and great literature meet.
Surrender
The beauty of pain, love, loss, grief and human intimacy, that is what this solemn and dignified pieta by Michaelangelo speaks of, to me. I don’t mean to say that sorrow always looks like this, tearless and peaceful. Losing someone can be a ferocious trip down the darkest pit, ripping your heart from your chest in the descent. But that’s not all we can hope for. There is an unearthly beauty to this kind of surrender, a deep peace that follows deep grief.
As a youth, I even tried my drawing hand at the moving serenity of Mary’s face, based on a black and white photograph not unlike this one.
Frédéric Chopin
When I was a teenager, I was a little in love with this brutal, tormented face. My connection to music and my attraction to the deeper reaches of man’s psyche come together in this painting and few portraits have made a more lasting impression on me than this one. It’s the only one of Chopin that seems to show a real man, rather than a stiff, almost waxen image. Its depth and agony make it stand out among all its contemporaries.
This is the face that lingered in the back of my head when I wrote my debut novel, for which I also chose two musicians as protagonists. As I was creating Tureck, the blind pianist haunted by ghosts from his past, this was the man I saw in my mind’s eye.
Drowning in colors
Perhaps impressionist art is easy art. In any case: it is easy to love, pleasing to look at. It is featured in just one calendar too many, sold in abundantly cheap reproductions.
I decide not to care. This is beauty of colors, in abundance, to suck in, to submerse yourself in.
This particular image, too, once served as an inspiration for my creative experiments with pastels.
The engulfing
I’m not very familiar with contemporary art. But this was one exhibition I was fortunate enough to see for real, in Paris, almost twenty years ago.
Honouring Rothko’s art is allowing yourself to be engulfed in what he has put onto the canvas. Viewers do so at their own peril, sometimes. There is no rationalizing this. The experience is sensory, and total, and some will say: religious.
Read her, too
One of America’s finest photographers, Sally Mann understands the art of hiding, showing and suggesting at the same time. Every one of her images is a story I feel I understand, but not quite. Her art tells of hidden truths, darker shadows beneath and the relentless pursuit for the perfect image.
I fell in love with her both photographer and writer when I read her autobiographic memoir and family saga Hold still. Her pen is as good as her eye, and this is not an exaggeration out of worship. She’s a hell of a writer.
Don’t only look at her pictures, read her words, too.
Ashes and snow
Gregory Colbert is a photographer who defies all human odds in portraying the relationship between man and animal. His photograpy is poetry and meditation alike, with breathtaking images showing wild animals and human beings in extraordinary interaction.
I don’t want to be in his images, I want to be his images.
P.S. Life changers
Thank you for looking and reading this far. As a treat, and a private tribute, I have decided to add two additional images here. They didn’t enter into the Facebook challenge. They didn’t need to.
The most beautiful or inspiring works in art history… It’s such a vast canvas, and it is simply impossible to know everything or do justice to all artists who have touched you, at one moment or another. I could fill another challenge entirely with children’s book illustrators, and another one with painters, or photographers, or any other kind of art form.
Instead, I want to go back to what this challenge was about for me in the first place: art that changed my life. And much as I try to appreciate and understand all kinds of art, some of the works that have changed my life are — not surprisingly — made by the people closest to me.
Whether their work will stand the test of time and will one day be counted among the greatest works of art history is irrelevant to me. What does matter is that they have changed my life, in the very best of ways. And they continue to do so, up to this day.
