I really love this drawing.
It so reminds me of this Korean painter whose works I haven't seen in like twelve years. We had one of her large paintings in the gallery where I used to work, and I can still see the painting in my mind's eye, but I have lost the artist's name. Somewhere I have the catalogue for the show. It was a washing bowl (probably porcelain) with a strange shadowy birdlike apparition (acuminate shape, like a rudbeckia leaf with the apex pointing down) floating over the bowl as if it were the spirit of a child. The apparition might have been skinner, lanceolate like a willow leaf. This shape for the soul (departing?) can be found often in past modes of visual representation--visual art, sacred writing, hieroglyphs and glyphs, ideograms, alphabetic languages. And obviously that's not just in Western art. Munch has that dark shape in at least one painting I'm fairly certain. The Korean artist's painting had a charcoal palette; it was all grays, whites and blacks. It might have owed its genesis to a dark reading of that Cassatt painting with the Mother bathing the child. Maybe it was a reading of that painting long after the death of the subjects portrayed.
That would be an interesting premise for a series of paintings or artworks: reading celebrated images with the passage of time. Questioning what survives of the essences and images portrayed in a work.
Rachel, you are so in synch with that artist in this piece in how you are using scale as a value, and in your emotional tonality.
Child's eye scale of death.
The other painting was similarly heartbreaking.
This feels so much like an elegy.
If it were a poem it would be an elegy. Or a threnody if you want to go to a different place, different art.
The cunnus shape (present here) is also--unsurprisingly--a frequently recurring motif in art.
This drawing strikes me as an allegory of our eviction from the womb.
The grievous component of being born?
There's definitely a maternal component, and I think that's why I connected it to the Korean painting I was discussing above, because subconsciously I connected that with the Cassatt painting and its "stand-in" womb of the washing bowl.
Of course, another rather unmissable reading of the massive shape is seeing it as a hooded figure, a mournful or ominous being looking backwards over it's shoulder. That's the classical representation of death, or of mourners with their hooded cloaks.
Now I'm thinking of the personification of grief in the Adams Memorial by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the funerary stolidity of that sculpted figure. But the cloak is not closed in the same manner.
Probably my favorite along those lines would be Brancusi's version of "The Kiss" which he did as a gravestone. The two souls which almost seem to be products of mitosis (the breasts on the figure at left the only real difference) are kissing, and have their arms wrapped around each. They are locked in an embrace and holding to each other as tightly as they can. It is, literally, a death-grip. But we know this is futile. This is a grave. Brancusi's visual irony is a stiletto.
These two funerary monuments subscribe to vastly different models of representation, bu they are both equally moving, equally great works of art.
And now that Brancusi image of involuntary mitosis makes me think of a great Wislawa Szymborska poem! Let me see if I can find it.
[from Wislawa Szymborska's View with a Grain of Sand
Autonomy
In danger, the holothurian cuts itself in two.
It abandons one self to a hungry world
and with the other self it flees.
It violently divides into doom and salvation,
retribution and reward, what has been and what will be.
An abyss appears in the middle of its body
between what instantly become two foreign shores.
Life on one shore, death on the other.
Here hope and there despair.
If there are scales, the pans don’t move.
If there is justice, this is it.
To die just as required, without excess.
To grow back just what’s needed from what’s left.
We, too, can divide ourselves, it’s true.
But only into flesh and a broken whisper.
Into flesh and poetry.
The throat on one side, laughter on the other,
quiet, quickly dying out.
Here the heavy heart, there non omnis moriar—
just three little words, like a flight’s three feathers.
The abyss doesn’t divide us.
The abyss surrounds us.
In memoriam Halina Poświatowska
Rachel writes of this one:
Nowords is an original mixed media drawing done on Strathmore 80lb. Acid Free paper using prismacolor nupastels, charcoal, marker and colored pencils on 9.23.08.
This is a strange piece and it inspired some strange words. Here they are:
"I can't USE my words this time. And I already messed it up."
trojan downing hours
sleep time. bridge. mail's here.
pathway, shrubbery, pond ache
distant, shelling _______.
If you want to see the whole thing together - here's the link to the post on my blog:
http://sephyrus.blogspot.com/2008/09/nowords.html
All drawings are signed and dated on the back.
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