Pulvis et umbra sumus: Tomás Mondragón – Allegory of Death

“To flower, the rose displayed her buds at morn,
And to grow old and wither, did she flower;
One is her cradle and her grave forlorn.
So men behold brief fortune’s earthly dower,
To die upon the day when they were born,
For the past ages are but as an hour.”

(Pedro Calderon de la Barca called “These flowers, whose pomp“)

Tomás Mondragón, Allegory of Death (Alegoría de la Muerte), 1856

Paintings such as this one, “Allegory of Death” by Tomás Mondragón have a special place in my heart; a place I keep locked at most times, but I hear the sounds from the drawer; the bones dancing like the bones of Rebecca’s parents in García Márquez’s novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude”. This is what the Spanish Baroque poets were writing about and the painters of the time painted, “in ictu oculi”, in a blink of an eye a life passes, in the same petals the rose has its cradle and its grave, once born we are already sailing on the river of death, everyone we love will be dead and we too will be dead, and we will either rot in the grave or our ashes the wind will scatter. This is the horrifying truth, and yet we are alive now and must live! What a strange contradiction. The death follows us like a shadow with a sand clock and each particle of sand is slowly slipping away, never to return. In no other poetry or paintings have I found a more disturbing or a more relatable vision of death as I have in Spanish Baroque poetry and art, and in Mexican art such as the one above. Often times the fragility of life is symbolically presented in the motifs of flowers or beautiful women because in these motifs the contrast between their vibrant, alive state and death is the most obvious and the most tragical. Tomás Mondragón’s painting is split into two parts; the left side shows a young, beautifully dressed woman standing by her vanity table and the right side shows her skeleton with a background of a graveyard where the crosses stand out like curses and even a tree has bare branches. The present and the future. The most beautiful rose will lose its fragrance and wither, and the most fashionable lady who spends her days at her vanity table and gazing in the mirror will be food for worms. Above the woman are clouds and a hand reaches out from the sky and cuts the thread; the invisible hand of God that decided everything. And we never know when the thread will be cut. There are even the warning words written in the lower right corner which translated as “This is the mirror that you cannot trick.” No perfume can cover the stench of death, no blush make the bones look pretty. Pulvis et umbra sumus; we are dust and shadows, as Horace wrote in his Odes (IV 7).

18th century illustration.

An 18th century illustration.

Frágil Como o Mundo (a.k.a. Fragile As The World) (Rita Azevedo Gomes, 2002)

Modern Ophelia – Millais and Tom Hunter’s Life and Death in Hackney

“O, woe is me, To have seen what I have seen, see what I see!”

(William Shakespeare, Hamlet)

Tom Hunter, The Way Home, 2000

John Everett Millais’ painting “Ophelia” is a beautiful Pre-Raphaelite painting, perhaps even the most beautiful painting that Millais has painted, but it is also a haunting image that keeps inspiring artists even nowadays. It is a blueprint of sorts that allows for further interpretations and reworkings of a seemingly simple theme; a girl drowning. The scene of Millais’ Ophelia drowning slowly with her gown spread out wide amid the enchanting greenery is unbearably dreamy, but the intricate details of natural elements such as grass, flowers and trees betray the Pre-Raphaelites’ philosophy of portraying nature with honesty. Millais painted Ophelia along the banks of the Hogsmill River in Surrey, near Tolworth, Greater London. Nature surrounding Ophelia in Hunter’s photograph is similarly intricate and it allows the eye to observe and indulge in all the details, but the background is not an idyllic English countryside with flowers and butterflies but instead an abandoned urban area, a “dark slippery, industrial motorway of a bygone era”. Nature is claiming back what is rightfully hers. The model for Millais’ Ophelia was Elizabeth Siddal, a moody redhead, the muse and lover of a fellow Pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Hunter’s Ophelia is a nameless, pale and rosy-lipped party girl coming home after a night out. Whereas Miss Sidall was trippin’ on laudanum, Hunter’s Ophelia must be coming down from an ecstasy trip. Millais’ Ophelia is beautifully dressed in a soft, silvery tulle gown which looks as if it could have been made from silver dandelion seeds and moonlight. On the other hand, Hunter’s Ophelia is a modern gal and there is nothing romantic about her black shirt and baggy dark blue cargo trousers which are spreading out on the water surface in the similiar way in which the dress of Millais’ Ophelia is spreading out as she is drowning slowly.

The photographs is only a fragment of a series of photographs called “Life and Death in Hackney” taken by Tom Hunter from 1991 to 2001. All the photographs depict a scene from contemporary life but bear resemblance to one or another Pre-Raphaelite painting. Here is an explanation of the series from the artist’s page:

“Life and Death in Hackney’ paints a landscape, creating a melancholic beauty out of the post-industrial decay where the wild buddleia and sub-cultural inhabitants took root and bloomed. This maligned and somewhat abandoned area became the epicentre of the new warehouse rave scene of the early 90’s. During this time the old print factories, warehouses and workshops became the playground of a disenchanted generation, taking the DIY culture from the free festival scene and adapting it to the urban wastelands. This Venice of the East End, with its canals, rivers and waterways, made a labyrinth of pleasure gardens and pavilions in which thousands of explorers travelled through a heady mixture of music and drug induced trances.

All the images draw upon these influences combining the beauty and the degradation with everyday tales of abandonment and loss to music and hedonism. The reworking of John Millais’s ‘Ophelia’ shows a young girl whose journey home from one such rave was curtailed by falling into the canal and losing herself to the dark slippery, industrial motorway of a bygone era.”

John Everett Millais, Ophelia, 1851

My Inspiration for April 2024

This April will stay in my memory as a month of beautiful walks and dreamy melodies. Konstantin Somov’s painting “Repose at Sunset”, shown bellow, perfectly illustrates the mood of April for me; the blooming lilacs, softness, dreaminess, yes that was April for me! I found the poetic and whimsical in places and things I thought were well-known and familiar to me. The freshly sprung new leaves, the blooming tulips, roses and wisteria have enchanted me like never before. Dandelions turning silver before my eyes, bamboo swaying in the wind, full of raindrops, old unused water wells overgrown with moss, sunsets above the river, reflections of trees and houses in the river… this April was full of such beautiful scenes.

“People aren’t homes, they never will be. People are rivers, always changing, forever flowing. They will disappear with everything you put inside them.”

(Nikita Gill)

“Self-display: no way to shine
Self-assertion: no way to suceed
Self-praise: no way to flourish

(Tao Te Ching)

“We are torn between nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.”

(Carson McCullers)

By Konstantin Somov

Picture found here.

Mukteshvara Temple is a 10th-century Hindu temple dedicated to Shiva located in Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India. (via Instagram: Jagadeesh Taluri)

Picture found here.

peach blossom in 阐福寺 chanfu temple, beihai park by 張萌Moe23 | gaogewf.

Picture by Bruce Lewis.

Instagram: elise.buch

Dolo, Veneto, Italy by Eleonora Boiserie

Nihonbashi – Tokyo, Japan. Picture found here.

Pink Night, Watercolor on Black Cotton Paper.

Han Lei :: Yellow Mountain 02, 2002-2008. | src Lumas

 

Picture found here.

Picture found here.

The model is styled as figures from the famous Tang dynasty painting “The Eighty-seven Immortals”.

Fashion Inspiration: Colours of India

Picture found here.

Picture found here.

Picture found here.

Picture found here.

Picture found here.

Picture found here.

Grandville: The Evening Star, The Shooting Star, The Morning Star…

“One day, though it might as well be someday
You and I will rise up all the way
All because of what you are
The prettiest star…”

(David Bowie, The Prettiest Star)

J.J. Grandville, Les étoiles du Soir (Evening Star), 1849

French Romantic era artist and illustrator J.J. Grandville is one of the artists whose work has captivated me in the last year. The first artwork of his that I had encountered was his litograph “The Metamorphosis of Dreams” years ago, then last spring I had written about his series of illustrations “Flowers Personified” in which flowers are depicted as beautiful damsels with different personalities. These days it is his series called “Les Etoiles” or “The Stars” from 1849 that fascinates me the most. The night-time is, after all, is so much more romantic than day and the stars are so much more mysterious than the sun. In Grandville’s wonderful romantic-bordering-on-surrealism imagination the stars are again personified as beautiful women clad in the fashions of the day. My favourite at the moment is the one above, “The Evening Star” because of its Gothic mood. The illustration shows the evening star personified as a woman standing on the balcony that arises, not out of a castle tower, but out of a cloud and looking out into the night. Ah, but she should look into the mirror, for nothing is as lovely as the evening star itself! There are rays of gold stardust shining all about her head and we can see the moon in the distance behind her. In the lower part of the illustration, down on earth, there is gloomy and isolated Gothic looking castle and bats flying about it in an ominous manner. And yet the aura around the evening stair is so serene and bringht and pure that even the gloominess of the castle 0r the eeriness of the bats cannot ruin the magic of the scene.

My other favourites are different in mood to the one above, but equal in beauty and intricacy. “The Morning Star” shows the morning star personified as a woman in a white gown in the 1840s style and a short black cape. Soft hair is dancing around her pale face and bright colourful stars are dancing above her dress and her cape in a groovy way. One star also serves as her hair decor. She is gliding through the night sky on a boat of clouds that are subservient to this goddess-like woman. She seems as soft as those clouds, as unattainable, as fleeting, for she is announcing a new day and a defeat of the night…at least for a while. Down from the ground she is being watched by some farmers, or workers, and a very curious and eager rooster who is depicted with more colour than the rest of the scene, to prove his importance of course, or at least he thinks so. “The Shooting Star” shows two lovers sitting on some meadow at night and up in the sky they are witnessing a shooting star, appearing for a moment intensely bright and strong on the night sky and then disappearing in an explosion of beauty. It is such a rare thing to see and no one can forget the moment they saw it, nor the person they were with when they saw it. I remember both times distinctly and I am very grateful that I got to see it. “The Shepherd’s Star” is a star personified as a very fashionable woman; her hair is adorned with many, many stars and the star that she is wearing as a headpiece is even grander. In contrast to the fashionable attire, her eyes seem drunk almost, or at least she seems in a sort of a haze; from love, or from drugs, or from joy, who knows. She is being watched by shepherds, a dog and some sheep. Just how magical and ethereal she is compared to the heavy, serious, and boring life down there on the ground. I love how soft the transitions are between the Lady Stars’ dresses and the clouds on which they are standing.

J.J. Grandville, The Morning Star, 1849

J.J. Grandville, The Shooting Star, 1849

J.J. Grandville, The Shepherd’s Star, 1849

Konstantin Somov – The Lovers

“There’s the same hotel, and we can go there now

We can go there now if you want to
Through the doors of that rented room
Yeah, we stumbled through
It was only hours

It seemed such a short while
We had no time to cry
Or sit and wonder why
We had so many things started to say”

(Tindersticks, Rented Rooms)

Konstantin Somov, The Lovers, 1933

“I could have drowned in those so-called dreams”

(Tindersticks, Rented Rooms)

I have been tremendously interested in the paintings of the Russian painter Konstantin Somov the whole of last year and still his work holds a spell over me mainly because he so often paints lovers and because of the escapist, nostalgic tendencies that he exhibits in paintings parties and park scenes with obvious hints to the paintings of Antoine Watteau and Rococo in general. Love, pleasure and the eighteenth century; who can resist!? And yet, what I like about his watercolours of lovers such as the one above, “The Lovers”, from 1933 is its simplicity, rawness and intimacy. While his eighteenth-century inspired paintings have an air of glamour, fun and slight decadence to them, these kind of watercolours are pure in that they depict a genuine emotion, a softness and tenderness between lovers which doesn’t seem like a scene from a comedy. It is more as if we are peeking through the keyhole and witnessing what we ought not to be witnessing. The fact that it was set in that time and not in some idealised past era also brings this sense of intimacy and immediacy. The poses of the lovers are not theatrical as his eighteenth-century depictions of lovers often are, but tender; the man is laying his head in the lap of the women, perhaps the safest place in the world for him, a flowery meadow of calmness and inspiration. One of her bosom is touching his head, but her head is turned away, she seems shy, or closed-off perhaps, or maybe I am reading too much into it. The other elements in the watercolour; the mirror, cushions, flowers on the windowsill, opened window, all brings a sense of domesticity and joy. The medium of watercolours truly fits the gentle mood of the scene.

The watercolour made me think of Tinderstick’s song “Rented Rooms” from their album “Curtains” (1997) which is about lovers stealing time to be together, rushing to all the secretive places where they can give in to their intimate urges. The relationship in the song is one characterised by a sense of impermanence, restlessness and instability, and not of the exciting kind because the lovers have a deep desire to connect but the physical union alone leaves them feeling again restless and yearning for more. Especially the lines “We can’t afford the time to sit and cry or to wonder why…” makes me think of this watercolour because lovers are always in a frenzy, with so many kisses yet to happen, who has time to sit and think about things!? In Somov’s another watercolour, “Daphnis and Chloe”, painted in 1931 and shown bellow, we again see the lovers tenderly depicted, though there is more of an erotic touch here for sure; the man is holding the woman around the waist and closing her eager-to-chit-chat lips with a kiss until they sink down in a bed of dreams. The woman’s rosy cheeks and her golden hair cascading down her neck and breasts give her a doll-like, elegant appearance.

Konstantin Somov, Daphis and Chloe, 1931, watercolour

Fashion Inspiration: Marie Antoinette Revival

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Pulp – Disco 2000: I Never Knew That You’d Get Married, I would be living down here on my own…

“I never knew that you’d get married
I would be living down here on my own
On that damp and lonely Thursday years ago…”

Still from the video.

Pulp’s song “Disco 2000” from their 1995 album “Different Class” is a song about the singer Jarvis Cocker’s childhood crush Deborah, but told through the lense of adulthood. The song is based on real events from Cocker’s childhood; there was indeed a girl called Deborah who was popular and pretty, but had no interest in Cocker and didn’t notice him at all. In the song he fantasises about meeting her at some distant point in the future, in the year 2000, when they’re both grown ups. There is a wittiness and a sense of humour, a slight self-deprecation which are all always present in Pulp’s songs but there is also a tinge of sadness, especially as the song’s narrator is realising that his childhood crush is now married while he is single and lonely on that damp Thursday: “I never knew that you’d get married/ I would be living down here on my own/ On that damp and lonely Thursday years ago….” There is even a cute sort of desperation when he sings “Oh, what are you doing Sunday, baby?/ Would you like to come and meet me, maybe?/ You can even bring your baby…” He doesn’t even care that she is with somebody, as long as he can see her.

Stills from the music video.

It is as if in one moment you are a carefree teen sitting bored in school, fantasising what your adult life might be, and you blink and suddenly you are twenty-something and your peers are getting married and having children. Doors are closing, opportunities being limited. We all have a certain someone that we fancied back in high school, or even primary school and we may have had certain fantasies and now we may have the what-ifs. That interest may have been only one-sided, or both parties may have been too shy to act upon anything… Time passes and school finishes. We move on with our life and we forget about that person, but there is always a warm, pure feeling to the memory. And the memory is pure and warm precisely because nothing happened; if something did happen, then it would likely leave us disappointed, as most school-age ‘loves’ do. Something that could have been always has more charm than something that is. For those living in small towns such as myself the feeling is even stronger because there is less people to see and it is almost impossible to avoid certain people even if we want to. Someone that was a rebel-without-a-cause, sitting with you in the last row in biology class and cracking jokes is now delivering pizza and you pretend not to see them when you do see them. I guess we’ll never meet at the fountain by the road.

The lyrics of the song:

“Oh, we were born within an hour of each other
Our mothers said we could be sister and brother
Your name is Deborah (Deborah)
It never suited ya
And they said that when we grew up
We’d get married, and never split up
Oh, we never did it, although I often thought of it

Oh, Deborah, do you recall?
Your house was very small
With wood chip on the wall
When I came ’round to call
You didn’t notice me at all

And I said, “Let’s all meet up in the year 2000
Won’t it be strange when we’re all fully grown?
Be there two o’clock by the fountain down the road”
I never knew that you’d get married
I would be living down here on my own
On that damp and lonely Thursday years ago

You were the first girl at school to get breasts
And Martyn said that you were the best
Oh, the boys all loved you, but I was a mess
I had to watch them try and get you undressed
We were friends, that was as far as it went
I used to walk you home sometimes but it meant
Oh, it meant nothing to you
‘Cause you were so popular…

Oh, what are you doing Sunday, baby?
Would you like to come and meet me, maybe?
You can even bring your baby
Ooh ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh…”

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The video for the song features a guy and a gal, played by models Jo and Patrick Skinny, who take time to get ready for a Saturday night disco and they both hope the other will also be there and they are both looking for a hook up. The video for “Disco 2000”, just like the video for the songs “Lipgloss” and “Common People” has that vibrant, artficial, retro aesthetic so typical for Pulp’s 1990s videos. Another thing I liked a lot about the video, apart from the garish, eye-candy, ’70s inspired aesthetics, is that it tells the tale almost in the style of a comic-book. If you pause the video every now and then, as I did to get screenshots for pictures for this post, you will notice that the the video is almost made out of pictures, a few seconds for each scene, and one after another and a story is told. There are even captions, unrelated to the song’s lyrics, which show us what the guy and the girl are thinking. It is interesting to see how they both want the other to notice them, but don’t want to appear to eager as well, so typical for love games. Jarvis Cocker did after all study fine art and film at Saint Martin’s College of Arts from 1988 to 1991 and aesthetic was important to him. I appreciate cleverness in lyrics and videos of rock songs, just as I appreciate art in various forms. This video is artistically interesting to me as any normal oil on canvas paintings would be.

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Louise Glück: Spring comes quickly, overnight the plum tree blossoms (Primavera)

“Primavera”; a poem celebrating spring from Louise Gluck 2006 poetry collection “A Village Life”. The motifs such as plum tree blossoming and birds singing are something dear and near to me at the moment because spring is indeed here and with it comes joy and lightness of life. I especially love the second to last line which describes the blossoms as the emblems of the resiliance of life. Trees, and the rest of nature, have their time to bloom and flourish just as they have their time to shed their leaves and let their branches be bare. They don’t resist it and they always have hope. Our lives too are made of seasons and even if we feel that our lives are in a spiritual state of winter – spring of the soul will inevitably follow.

Renoir, Young Woman with a Japanese Umbrella, 1876

Primavera

Spring comes quickly: overnight
the plum tree blossoms,
the warm air fills with bird calls.
In the plowed dirt, someone has drawn a picture of the sun
with rays coming out all around
but because the background is dirt, the sun is black.
There is no signature.
Alas, very soon everything will disappear:
the bird calls, the delicate blossoms. In the end,
even the earth itself will follow the artist’s name into oblivion.
Nevertheless, the artist intends
a mood of celebration.
How beautiful the blossoms are—emblems of the resilience of life.
The birds approach eagerly.

Alphonse Mucha – Girl With a Plate With a Folk Motif

Alphonse Mucha, Girl With a Plate With a Folk Motif, 1920

The first thing that catches my attention about this portrait is the girl’s eyes; concentrated, focused, not blinking and not shying away, but staring deep into my soul. With a gaze like that, one might assume this was a portrait of a femme fatale or some enchantress from Arthurian legends, but actually the portrait shows the Czech Art Nouveau artist Alphonse Mucha’s pretty daughter Jaroslava who was eleven years old at the time this portrait was painted. A great poser she seems to have been; like mother, like daughter, I might say because Mucha’s wife Maria Chytilová was his muse and often posed for his paintings. Seriously, who the hell looks this badass while holding a paintbrush in one hand and a pretty plate in another!? Jaroslava studied ballet, but decided to give that up and follow her father’s footsteps. She not only posed for him, but also helped him out in the studio, by mixing colours for his Slav Epic and also painting the starry sky in the painting “Slavs in their Original Homeland: Between the Turanian Whip and the sword of the Goths”. After the World War II, Jaroslava even worked on restoring the paintings from the Slav Epic which had been damaged during the war due to bad storing conditions. It seems that the determined look in her eyes in the portrait isn’t just an aesthetic thing, but a representation of her character. I love everything about this portrait; her eyes the most, but also her pose, the way she is showing off that pretty plate with floral folk motifs, and the way her pinky finger is resting coquettishly on her upper lip. The yellow flower in her long, flowing hair makes her seem like a free-spirited hippie girl and the white dress she is wearing, with a puff sleeve tightened with a red ribbon, appear peasant like which perhaps goes well with the folk motif on the porcelain plate. The motif on the plate with a stylised tulips and sunflowers is both simple and charming. The blue background is echoed by traces of blue and lilac in her hair. The brush in her hand seems to say; you may think I am a muse, but I have a few artistic tricks up my sleeves as well.