Flame, Glass and Ink are Poems, essays, and reading notes by Stefania Joori Suh

Tag: painting

  • Paul Gauguin: With Sixpences Beneath a Visiting Moon

    The Writings of a Savage by Paul Gauguin

    With sixpences beneath a visiting moon, Gauguin could produce wonder. He was an artist in an endless pursuit of the rising sun at the dawn of a day with a flaming glory in dazzling magnificence. He was an intellectual with a wealth of knowledge drawn from a wide range of reading and classical Jesuit education. Gauguin was a man of irony, with contrasting colors reflected in the soul’s spectrum, from the passionate red to the sanguine blue, hopeful green, and melancholic purple, which is why he left Vincent Van Gogh alone in Arles, in never-ending loneliness. He craved recognition in a grand salon, yet he longed for independence on an island beneath an ancient sun. So, naturally, I wanted to know about Gauguin from his own writings, not from another in the form of a biography. Hence, The Writings of a Savage by Paul Gauguin.

    The book is an attractive compendium of mostly letters to his select few friends and, occasionally, to his wife, as well as essays and articles on the arts and religion, demonstrating Gauguin’s erudition and introspection. While reading the book, I could not help but think that if he had been a professional journalist or an art critic, his artistic talent would have basked in the glorious dawn sun rather than a struggling painter always on the verge of starvation. But most of all, what I wanted to know was if Gauguin had cut off Gogh’s ear, as I heard the rumor. Before reading this book, I had already assumed Gauguin was a man of temper because his image was incompatible with the Dutch painter’s delicate, sophisticated, and sensitive appearance and temperament. But while my prejudice was not entirely faulty, Gauguin proved himself innocent as he talked about it before his impending death away from civilization. Besides, my reading of Gauguin’s writings convinced me that he was not culpable for the injury, even if some like to assemble circumstantial rumors to make the French pariah artist appear jealous and violent toward the suffering Dutch genius. Gauguin might have been passionate, but his passion is directed toward his artistic creation of the worlds he sees in his mind, while the snobbishness of critics and bureaucrats curates the works of painters who know nothing about the arts.

    Imagination, innovation, and independence are the jewels of Gauguin’s prime colors that create his artistic Elysium. Gauguin was liberal in social stance, especially against clericalism, but sovereign in his artistic philosophy that how to draw doesn’t mean an exact copy of the figure because that’s not the purpose of art for art’s sake. As the title suggests, Gauguin was a noble savage who, as a disciple of Rousseau, returned to a primordial state of humanity to escape the over-intellectualized inertia of civilization, which depreciated and ignored his art. I still can’t say the book converted me to the cult of his paintings, which differ from those of Renoir, Monet, and Pissarro. But the book is a medium of looking through the labyrinth Gauguin has built, leading to his secret garden, wondrously vibrant and dazzlingly radiant.

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  • The Electrical Life of Louis Wain according to Benedict Cumberbatch

    The Electrical Life of Louis Wain is joy and sadness, lightheartedness and seriousness, just like his paintings. It’s about love and art in the oddly beautiful vagaries of what it means to be a human (in the company of cats). Wain’s cats graced the epochs before Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse (and Minnie) and His Gangs) debuted. But Wain was not Disney, and would he have even wished it? Perhaps, that is why Benedict Cumberbatch decided to give Wain a second chance to shine his name once more on earth in the magic of moving pictures that resurrected him from the lapse of time through the chapters of his story in this superbly narrative of the artist.

    Louise Wain was a brilliant artist, a contemporary of French impressionist artists, such as Monet, Pissarro, Degas, and Renoir, and Dutch Vincent Van Gogh, all of whom were united in the brotherhood of independent spirits and resilient creativity. Yet Wain’s was a different sort, more existentially debauched in the provisional circulation of works, in the crossroads of the reality of being the only male figure in the parentless family led by the dominant matriarchal sister and of the ideal of ensconcing himself in the solitary niche. All artists are by nature sensitive, but Wain was extraordinarily sensitive, and the world was too much for someone like him to deal with. His wife, the light of his life, was the only happiness and love he felt and shared, but jealous God took her away from him and left him in the lurch of the familial duties and responsibilities in the somber household. This house eventually drove him and his younger sister into the oblivion of reason to the end. Yet, notwithstanding the personal tragedy, Wain’s unique visual world articulated with the sonar modulation of impulse that sparked his creative spirit yearning to soar up to the boundless ether on a par with constellations with stars.

    Wain’s wife encouraged and supported him because she knew of his genius despite other people’s ignorance.

    Benedict Cumberbatch, now universally recognized as the Sherlock thanks to the phenomenally successful BBC series, proved to be a superb character actor who became Louis Wain rather than merely playing the artist’s part. Ancient Greeks and Romans regarded actors as an equivalent of a spiritual medium whose body could be channeled into another spirit for a willful possession during a mysterious rite of sacred ceremony. If that was the case, as it were, that was how I felt watching Cumberbatch being Wain as if he had summoned the soul of the dead artist from the beyond and asked him how the artist’s life would be told. His naturally mild, gentle deliverance of character nuanced the inner fear, confusion, and frustration that Wain must have felt in dealing with the realities of everyday life as a reluctant and unlikely head of household. Yet, his passionate eyes and particular diction dictate that Wain was an artist of force, a man not of an age but for all seasons.

  • Portrait of Vincent Van Gogh

    Vincent van Gogh: A Life From Beginning to End by Hourly History

    My rating: 5 of 5 stars

    Here’s a portrait of a man who hated being alone yet found freedom when alone. Austere yet bohemian, religious yet autonomous, he was a paradox himself like the faces of Janus. It was no other than the painter Vincent Van Gogh himself in his well-known portrait looking more in disappointment with the world than in madness against it.

    As the late eminent Australian biographer of Ben Jonson Ian Donaldson once put, good biography is anything but a bland, chronological summation of a man’s life, and I am not intent on reciting the dates of from Gogh’s birth to death and in-betweens. Instead, I am all mind in positing what I think he was, other than the man with a bandaged self-mutilated ear because our sensory perception often betrays the truthfulness of what we see when stimulated to the external sensation. Indeed, Gogh was a disturbed man whose sensitivity found no elbow room in the world with which he so endeavored to have a long-lasting content relationship. It is not to say that Gogh was an archetypal self-imposed exiled artist who voluntarily distanced himself from ordinary life scenes. Hardly so. As shown in his letter to his beloved little brother Theo, who helped his misunderstood forlorn artist brother as ever, Gogh tried to be as good-humored and cheerful as he wanted. Still, it was the world that seemed to betray him with blows that bludgeoned his unalloyed wishes and noble aspirations.

    Gogh’s paintings reflect his love of realism and reject artificial romanticism without the ideal romantic ambiance in vogue with the time. He was interested in all that existed as they were because discovering beauty in the coarseness of reality was his objective in achieving creative and experiential values. In this regard, Gogh was in the same artistic vein as Francoise Millet, whose paintings Gogh admired because Millet believed that treating the commonplace with the feeling of the sublime was what gave art its true power. The only difference between the masters of art was how to portray it with individual flairs of colors, techniques, and perspectives based on their tastes and judgments. Gogh’s ‘Potato Eaters” might not have that romantic dignity surrounding the hardscrabble peasants. Still, they were unforgettably expressive in the nuanced struggles and strife they had to bear and live with. Perhaps the uneasy cohabitation of the independent spirit and the loving heart distinguished Gogh from his famous peers who had the practical sense to reconcile their creative souls to social needs.

    Moreover, Gogh lost a sense of direction when he realized that a man of the cloth wasn’t his cloth. The existential frustrations from the confliction of the will then added to his already innate fragile sensitivity, a hereditary mental trait running in his maternal family. Nevertheless, Gogh continuously endeavored to fend it off and conquer it, even when the citizens of Arles, where he dreamed of building a haven for his kindred spirits, united to expel him from the city he once cherished. However, one good-hearted postman continued to give him a touch of kindness till he voluntarily admitted himself into a mental asylum for the peace of his mind and others’.

    To me, Gogh tried to live up to his conviction of good, fulfilled life with exquisite sensibilities, and unalloyed humanity too great for the realities of the world he was born into. His life was life imitating art, and art was not imitating but expressing life as he saw. Yet, be it ever the play of the fate, the more he tried to be good-humored, the more estranged he became because he was an extraordinary artist constantly breaking away from confinement prejudicial to his ever sensitive and creative spirit. Upon reading this elegantly narrated life of Vincent Van Gogh, I realized the truth of the genius only took some time for its brilliance to shine, no matter how long it would take. Who would have thought Vincent Van Gogh, who once sold only one of his works out of hundreds, would be looking at his admirers in the constellation of brilliant painters in heaven? For those who are creators of arts in all genres, famous or hidden, amateur or professional, the story of Vincent Van Gogh will be a consolation to the heart and hope to the spirit that never knows the end.



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  • portrait of Vincent Van Gogh

     

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    Self-Portrait of Vincent Van Gogh

    A man without an ear had no friends

    To show him the face of compassion

    To lend him an ear to listen always

    To the cries of a soul grim and ashen

    Lost in the gallery of a dark house

    Where nature oppressed ruled the mind

    And commended it to suffer with the body. 

    The Studio of the South in tatters

    assailed a reservoir of dreams;

    The Southern Sun of Arles in shreds

    speared his soul with a shout of taunts

    And made his heart sink in the abyss

    Till it burst with an outcry evermore

    Of the man with the unseen voices

    That grew loud and grew louder

    As he was estranged from himself

    And left the world with a thunder

    Of fire, a fire of freedom from 

    The frights of the broken soul. 

    Thereby hangs a tale of a painter

    Breathed with poetic madness of arts. 

    P.S.: I have recently come across an article about the nature of Vincent Van Gogh’s mental illness that eventually resulted in his suicide in May 1889 with a pistol that punctured his heart in Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Sant Remy, France.

    It is said that Gogh had shown symptoms of disturbed mental states since he was 17 years old when his parents tried to get him committed. He was later seen eating coals while painting and told of hearing voices and seeing hallucinations. As a matter of fact, Gogh was from a family with a history of mental illness: his maternal aunt was epileptic, and two of his siblings died in asylums and two others by suicide. Surely, this doesn’t aver that mental illness is hereditary and therefore brings grist to the mill of eugenists.

    In my opinion, it seems more likely that Gogh’s tragic life story comes from a combination of Gogh’s disappointment with the failed reception of his works and frustration with his ability to deal with the existential reality interacting with the unfavorable circumstances surrounding his struggles to mark his existence through a medium of art, which deserves of recognition for its beauty of his highly innate artistic sensibilities that glow in the dark night of the soul. To me, whether Gogh was clinically insane is to miss the gift of the artist to humankind that always thrives in the beauty of arts.