the death & resurrection of candlelight dinners (we need to talk about art more often)
Dear P. Moïra Autumnknees Bat if she's reading this and Everybody Else, too:
I wanna talk about paintings, because. Okay.
My favorite paintings are the ones that tell strange stories. The ones that almost seem to glow with a kind of life, like they have blood inside of them. Abstract stuff like Kandinsky doesn't do it so much for me. I mean, it can be fascinating in its way because it doesn't quite make sense: intricately drawn, meticulously plotted abstract art always makes me think of maps and diagrams. For incomprehensible places and machines that can only be built in the brain. It doesn't touch me at the level of my heart and guts and marrow, though, and I can't hear it sing. It's all very cerebral for me, and sort of overcluttered at times. But the colors are beautiful.
What I love are the pictures I feel as though I could walk into and live inside. Maybe that's a little...I don't know, unsophisticated sounding (sometimes I worry ridiculously about sounding unsophisticated), but I do. I like to pretend that I'm a person in a Chagall, twisting in the wind above tiny, flattened-out red and blue houses, so in love with another person or with the moon that I've utterly stopped caring about the rules that would keep me from floating and flight. I like Schiele's skinny, ropily-muscled, weirdly contorted men and women. They look like they're looking at you, or about to talk. What would they say? That guy in the leather coat jerking off, or those women crawling across the ground with wild hair and stockings and 1910's underwear. I like the one called Death and the Maiden, where Egon is Death and his teenage ex-lover is the Maiden. Even their skin looks uncalm and alive and dirt-crusted. (I guess these paintings are supposed to be shocking and/or sexy, and I guess they were and maybe still are to some people, but that's not really how I think of them or why I find them compelling. If that makes sense.) Remedios Varo is maybe my favorite. The last thing she ever painted was this still life of a table and a candle and an egg and some bread and some fruit, except it isn't still at all. The tablecloth twists itself around and around, crinkling into precise, angular folds. Everything on the table rises up in circles, and you can almost see it in motion, spinning, the light of the candle and the cracked egg becoming a spiral galaxy in miniature. And the fruit bursts open and spills its seeds. I think it's the kind of painting I would like to paint if I could paint and I knew that I was going to die soon.
You see? You see. I don't know how or whether it sounds or sings, but I know what it does to the things I see when I close my eyes and press on the lids.
Your fellow admirer of canvas, acrylic, oil, egg tempura, horsehair bristles and Sigur Ros,
F. Julia Alice Clementine