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.

Where Do We Go Now But Nowhere? (Odilon Redon’s The Boat)

“Around the duck pond we grimly mope
Gloomily and mournfully we go round again
And one more doomed time and without much hope
Going round and around to nowhere…”

(Nick Cave, Where do we go now but nowhere)

Odilon Redon, The Boat, 1901

French painter Odilon Redon’s artistic career seemed to have shifted from one extreme to another sometime in the mid 1890s and he transitioned almost over night from painting eerie and nightmarish charcoal drawings which even caught the attention of the writer Joris-Karl Huysmans and which were mentioned in his infamous novel “A Rebours”, to painting dreamy and mystical scenes in oils and pastels, all in vibrant, groovy colours. I am so glad that he had exhausted all the possiblities that the medium of charchoal offered because, as interesting as I find his early phase when he made charchoal drawings, I do much prefer his colourful post-1895 phase and the pastel “The Boat” which you can see above is a beautiful example of that. Whichever motif he decided to paint there is always something unreal about it. “The Boat” is just one of the many wonderful pastels in which he explores the motif of a boat and sea. These pastels are always colourful but tinged with a sense of mystery; where is the boat going and why? In fact, it seems it isn’t going anywhere, or rather, it’s going nowhere. Both the sea and the sky seem strangely static, there is not even an illusion of the wild and vast sea waves that will rock the boat. Is the boat in the shallow waters, near the coast, or out there in the open sea? It is hard to tell because the painting is closely cropped, but nevertheless there is a sense of loneliness and isolation, as if they are miles and miles away from everything that is familiar. The two mysterious veiled figures sitting “gloomily and mournfully” in a boat appear almost always in these pastel boat scenes by Redon, and the figures are “without much hope, going round and around to nowhere…” What chimes with me so well these days in these boat scenes is a sense of mystery and vagueness. They are gazing upwards but they are no stars in the lavender sky to guide them. Frozen in a colourful dream. The colours and shapes are melting but the mystery remains. The two figures are in a boat going towards an unknown destination, sailing through the uncharted territories of the vast sea and there is no map and no compass for them. As static as it visually seems, this painting symbolises a journey for me; a journey in a physical as much as in a spiritual sense. Where do we go now… but nowhere?

Carl Krenek – Sleeping Beauty: I’d Sleep Another Hundred Years, O love, for Such Another kiss!

“I’d sleep another hundred years,
O love, for such another kiss;”
“O wake forever, love,” she hears,
“O love, ’t was such as this and this.”

…..

“O eyes long laid in happy sleep!”
“O happy sleep that lightly fled!”
“O happy kiss, that woke thy sleep!”
“O love, thy kiss would wake the dead!”

(Lord Tennyson, The Day-Dream)

Carl Krenek (1880-1948), A Fairy Tale Scene – Sleeping Beauty, n.d.

“In the topmost bedchamber of the house he found her. He had stepped over sleeping chambermaids and valets, and, breathing the dust and damp of the place, he finally stood in the door of her sanctuary. Her flaxen hair lay long and straight over the deep green velvet of her bed, and her dress in loose folds revealed the rounded breasts and limbs of a young woman. He opened the shuttered windows. The sunlight flooded down on her. And approaching her, he gave a soft gasp as he touched her cheek, and her teeth through her parted lips, and then her tender rounded eyelids. Her face was perfect to him…”
(Anne Rice, Sleeping Beauty)

French Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé said that “To define is to kill. To suggest is to create”, and even before him, the seventeenth century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho wrote that “a poem that suggests 70-80 percent of its subject may be good, but a poem that only suggests 50-60 percent of the subject will always retain its intrigue”. This way of looking at things stuck with me and, suddenly, while looking at this painting by Carl Krenek and wondering why is it that I love it so much, it dawned on me… The reason for my immense appreciation of Carl Krenek’s painting “A Fairy Tale Scene – Sleeping Beauty” is because of its deliberate vagueness.

I have seen many nineteenth and early twentieth century illustrations of this famous fairy tale, but this one strikes me as the most original and perhaps also the most vibrant and flowery one as well. Instead of boring us with architectural details of the chamber where the Sleeping Beauty is sleeping in her bed, and painting all her entourage and all the sleeping courtiers and what not, Krenek focuses on the bare essentials; the slumbering princess and the roses that have grown over her bed, which are the two main motives of the fairy tale and the most recognisable to our eyes. This instantly brings freshness and our eye is excited. This is not to say that Krenek wasn’t detailed in his approach, far from it. The scene is very detailed, but in areas where it matters. Just look at the meticulous way he had painted all the flowers and thorns and branches, how they fill the space beautifully and naturally.

Krenek certainly wasn’t vague when it came to depicting the roses; here is one roses, now you, my dear viewers, imagine the others. No, it seems he really put his heart into all these flowers and they look ever so cheerful and vibrant, from the delicate pink ones above the princess and the more richly coloured red, orange and yellow ones that are growing around her bed. There is little to be seen of the actual Sleeping Beauty; only her pale face with the peacefully closed eyes and her white dress. It seems the roses are more of a main character than she is. Otherwise, I may have preferred to see the princess painted in more details, her beauty more enchanced, but in this painting I find the whole vagueness just delightful and I don’t regret there not being more of a focus on the princess. In fact, our eye may be even more drawn to the princess precisely because we cannot see her clearly. They mystery is alluring.

Sleeping Beauty is perhaps my favourite fairy tale and there are so many ways to look at this story on a symbolic level. Is she really just a princess who fell asleep because of the evil witch, waiting for a kiss to awake her? The theme of awakening can be interpreted in many ways; these days the nature, kissed by spring, is waking up from a long slumber of winter, but also, it can symbolise the girl’s awakening and ripening into womanhood, after that fateful kiss, just as the main character Faustine in the French 1972 film “Faustine and the Beautiful Summer” says, after being kissed by a man for the first time, “With this kiss my life begins!”. Is it the kiss of the Prince which awakens the Sleeping Beauty’s dormant soul, or is a love arrow shot by Cupid from above?

And now, to end the post, here are some beautiful verses from Lord Tennyson’s poem “The Day-Dream”:

“And on her lover’s arm she leant,
And round her waist she felt it fold;
And far across the hills they went
In that new world which is the old.
Across the hills, and far away
Beyond their utmost purple rim,
And deep into the dying day,
The happy princess followed him.
“I’d sleep another hundred years,
O love, for such another kiss!”

Sleeping Beauty by the Brothers Grimm, illustrated by Heinrich Lefler. Part of a fairy tale calender published by Berger & Wirth, Leipzig, 1905

Galileo Chini – Chinese New Year’s Eve Celebration in Bangkok

Galileo Chini, Chinese New Year’s Eve Celebration in Bangkok (Festa dell’ultimo dell’anno a Bangkok) 1911-13

I have written about Galileo Chini’s beautiful, romantic painting “L’Amore” from 1919 last week, but let us go a few years back in his career and take a look at his 1911-13 painting “Chinese New Year’s Eve Celebration in Bangkok” which is very different in mood, but equally beautiful and worthy of attention. The stunning, exotic visuals have an equally fascinating and exotic background story to match. As I wrote in my previous post on Chini’s art; Galileo Chini was an eclectic and vibrant figure in the Italian art scene at the turn of the century. Painter, designer, decorator, ceramic artist, and an important figure in the “Liberty style” (Stile Liberty), which was the Italian version of Art Nouveau, just as Secession was the Austrian (or rather Austro-Hungarian) version of Art Nouveau. Chini had a great interest in all things decorative, in combining arts and crafts, mostly in the area of ceramics and decorations, and has a taste for the Oriental. And surprise surprise, Rama V, the King of Siam, was travelling in Italy and saw the decorations that Chini had made at the Venice Biennale. He was impressed with the colours, shapes and the overall appeal of the Liberty Style and he offered Chini to come to Bangkok and decorate the Ananda Samakhom Throne Hall, which was newly built by Italian architects Annibale Rigotti and Mario Tamagno. Even the marble for the hall was brought from Carrara, it was a true Thailand meets Italy artistic situation in many ways.

Chini arrived in Bangkok in the late days of spring of 1911 and he worked joyously on his project, but in his free time he also painted for himself and such example is the painting above. The Oriental influence, experienced in real life, continued to haunt his art until the rest of his life and career. Even the interior decoration for his second home, Casa delle Vacanze, in Lido di Camaiore, was inspired by the Oriental magic. Needless to say, he had returned from his Bangkok trip with many a charming Siamese and Chinese objects which I am sure were dear to his heart. “Chinese New Year’s Eve Celebration in Bangkok” is a beautiful example of Chini’s interest and delight in the life of the locals there. The painting is just bursting with colours and vibrancy. The place seems to be swimming in red, yellow, lime green and orange lanterns. The colourful procession of the figures in the festival are accompanied by the papier mache dragon whose face expression looks more amusing than scary. The faces of the people in the celebration look awfully pale and composed, as if made out of wax, somewhat strange to me is their complexion and face expressions, it almost stands in contrast to the magical mood of the lanterns and fireworks. And look at these gorgeous lanterns! How they’re shining and smiling brightly! Who needs stars anymore!? We can see a bit of the dark blue night sky in the upper right corner, but it is so irrelevant in comparison to the joy of the glowing lanterns. I love how everything is painted in these little dashes, the surface of the painting seems flickering and alive, which goes well with the active, vibrant and joyous mood of the festival.

Felix Vallotton – Yellow and Green Sunset – 800th Post!

“A sunset so beautiful that the rest of your life will seem anticlimactic.”

(Disenchantment, S1 E2 )

Felix Vallotton, Yellow and Green Sunset (Coucher de soleil jaune et vert) 1911

The vibrant colours of Felix Vallotton’s painting “Yellow and Green Sunset” from 1911 immediately spoke to me. I am just mesmerised by these rich lavender, yellow and turqouise shades! How dreamy is this purple!? How vivacious and magical this yellow!? This painting is surely one of the most magical depictions of a sunset that I have seen in art. The motif of the painting, that of a beach in the sunset of the day with two small human figures walking by, brings to mind the beautiful and melancholy landscapes of the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, but the mood and the colours that Vallotton here uses are completely different. Whereas Friedrich would have been subtle and paid attention to shades and tones of colours, Vallotton paints almost as if he trew a bucket of purple, yellow, blue and green onto the canvas. The intense, almost garish colours cover huge portions of the paintings and it is a delight for the eye. The painting is almost made of different horizontal stripes of colour; from the sky to the sea to the beach, but if one looks more closely, one will notice the details such as the purple sky that is made out of pink lines, or the rocks on the beach in the shallow water, colored gold by the light of the fading sun. A few days ago I was sitting by the river and I wittnessed a sunset very similar to the one portrayed in this painting and this connection is something that I cherish. Also, this is my 800th post and I decided to write about this painting because it holds a special meaning for me now. The quote in the beginning of the post comes from the second episode of the first season of the show Disenchantment where the main character Bean and her friends Elfo and Luci are on the Party Barge and the sailor makes a comment on the sunset, that it is “(sunset) so beautiful that the rest of your life will seem anticlimactic,” and for some reason this line stuck with me… The sunset I had seen the other day was indeed mesmerising and its colours were so strong that I felt them impressing themselves upon my soul, the yellow of the sun tastes like sweet mellon… but I do hope the rest of my life will not be anticlimactic now, hehe.

Fashion Inspiration for Spring 2022

Lunetta Earrings by Jennifer Behr.

Instagram: devyncrimson.

Instagram: devyn crimson

Earrings, found here.

Instagram: devyn crimson.

Tilfi – Charbagh Collection, found here.

Edgar Degas – Russian Dancers

Edgar Degas, Russian Dancers, 1899, pastel

Without a doubt the motif of a female body, nude or dressed, in various different activities, was Degas’ favourite motif to paint. He made series of paintings portraying ballerinas, laundresses, miliners, women bathing themselves, but a very interesting little series is his pastel drawings of Russian dancers made in 1899.

These pastels are characterised by vibrancy and liveliness and that is exactly what instantly appealed to me about the pastels. The colourfully clad figures of these Russian dancers contrast strongly with the dainty and ethereal figures of ballerinas that Degas had painted previously. In all three of the pastels that I have chosen to present here we seen three or more dancers caught in the movement, dressed in their traditional Eastern European garments. The dancers are situated against a background of nature in verdant greens and yellows so it almost seems as if the dancers are peasant girls dancing on a field, or a meadow in the countryside, naturally and spontaneously, stomping on wildflowers and breathing in the fresh spring air while nearby a brook is murmuring and birds are singing. So convincing is Degas’ portrayal of the dancers that we might almost forget that he saw them at the theatre in Paris. The Eastern European dancers had an exotic appeal to Parisians who, instead of actually travelling there, could simply go to the theatres and cabarets and enjoy the vibrant costumes, strange rhythms and majestic dancing. Even though these pastels are named “Russian Dancers”, the dancers were actually from Ukraine which was at the time under the Russian Empire and Tzar Alexander II had a policy of Russification at the time. Also, to fin de siecle Parisians it was probably all the same so the generic title “Russian Dancers” stayed.

Degas does a wonderful job at both capturing the dancers in movement, and also capturing the subtle details of their wonderful and intricate exotic costumes; white blouses, skirts in orange, pink, yellow, lavender and green, their flower crowns and necklaces. We are truly able to observe the details and feast our eyes on them while at the same time feeling as though we are witnesing the dancers in action. Their volumionous skirts are swirling, their legs kicking in the air; what wild energy these pastels exude! Degas called these pastels “orgies of colour”, and it is easy to see why. I mean, just soak in the colours in the pastel bellow; the green and purple skirts, the lobster-pink of the flowers, the orange beads or the necklace, then the soft pink-yellowish tinted sunset sky in the background. The colours are so well-chosen and spectacular. It is truly a colour study of these dancing girls. In the last pastel there is a lovely contrast of the blue trimming on the pink and orange skirts. Not to mention the dazzling colourful ribbons in the dancers’ hair in the first pastel which also features a lovely, clear blue spring sky.

Edgar Degas, Russian Dancers, 1899, charcoal and pastel, on tracing paper, mounted on cardboard, 62.9×64.8 cm

Edgar Degas, Russian Dancers, 1899, pastel

Henri Matisse – Interior with a Young Girl (Girl Reading)

“Colour is a power which directly influences the soul. Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand which plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul.”

(Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art)

Henri Matisse, Interior with a Young Girl (Girl Reading), 1904–05

Matisse’s girl in the painting is a quiet little girl, completely absorbed in the book that she is reading. She is seated at the table, perhaps in the dining room. We are somewhat able to decipher the space around her. A bowl of fruits at the table alongside a jug of water. Clearly it wasn’t Matisse’s intention to portray this interior scene in a realistic manner. So what was his intention; playing with colour and appealing to our senses? Perhaps. Matisse is not one of my favourite painters, but when I need my dose of colours and vibrancy I go to Fauvists and their leader Matisse just as the junkie goes to his dealer at the streetcorner. Colour truly has power to uplift us; just look at all the gorgeous, vibrant shades of yellow, red, turquoise, pink, blue and green. So much life and vivacity going on in a single canvas! It’s so childlike and unpretentious. The girl in the painting is Matisse’s ten year old daughter Marguerite who was the daughter of Matisse’s model Caroline Joblaud. Portrait of a girl reading brings to mind the many portraits of children by Renoir who was Matisse’s friend and an artist he looked up to. But in Matisse’s painting the little girl isn’t just a pretty girl in a cozy bourgeoius interior, no, it seems that the colourful patchwork interior composed of contrasting and complementing pathes of colour is actually the interior of Marguerite’s playful, imaginative mind. I imagine that, as she is reading the book, the world around her is transformed accordingly and all the magic of the words and scenes described therein suddently come to life because Marguerite has the power of imagination; she has the power to transcend the ugliness of reality, its dullness and lifelessness, and paint it in all the colours her heart desires, to make it whimsical. And clearly Matisse nurtured his inner child throughout his life, for even his collage cut-outs which he was making in his old days are totally child-like and playful. Matisse transformed the ordinary into extraordinary in this painting. A simple interior scene which might have been boring if painted realistically in shades of brown and beige, is a landscape of vivacity. The space in the painting appears flat but highly decorative and buzzing with excitement. The energy of the painting, and we cannot deny that paintings have energies that directly speak to us, is that of a child’s laughter and play, bright pink ice cream melting in a summer’s day, jumping on trampoline, ribbons, bonbons and candy-floss, the world of fairy tales and make-believe. I don’t know about the rest of you, but when I gaze at this painting, I feel rejuvenated. This just might be one of my favourites by Matisse.

Jean-Vincent Simonet – Under Neon Loneliness

“Under neon loneliness, everlasting nothingness.”

(Manic Street Preachers, Motorcycle Empintess.)

I recently stumbled upon these groovy photographs by a young French photographer Jean-Vincent Simonet and they instantly captivated me! This series of photographs, named “In Bloom” and indeed it is blooming with all sorts of vibrant colours, is a product of nocturnal wanderings through the busy streets of Tokyo and Osaka. But these photographs show the cities in a rather different view than most people walking the streets in those same evenings saw it. Vibrant colours melting into one another, slightly distorted shapes of buildings and streets, neon signs, purple skies and pink streets look like something out of a Sailor Moon anime, and also, for some reason, they remind me of the line “Under neon loneliness, everlasting nothingness” from the song “Motorcycle Emptiness” by the Welsh rock band Manic Street Preachers; the video for that song was also, coincidentally, filmed in Tokyo where the band is seen walking the streets, under the garish neon signs and shining promises of fun that the city has to offer, but their faces show alienation from all that garish world. Therefore, I see these photographs not only as psychedelic, bubbly and wild in colours, but also as a garishly coloured fantasy world of chaos and excitement which offers cheap dreams but nonetheless leaves one lonely and lost; I have never felt more lonely than when wondering the streets in the evening, seeing the glitter and neon lights and feeling complete emptiness and detachment from it all. But they can also be seen as presenting the magic of the night when anything seems possible and one can be whoever one wants; the dream is pulsating and alive until the faint grey light of dawn kills it. Simonet made prints of the photographs onto plastic paper then washed the photograph with chemicals and that is how he succeeded in creating images with such a psychedelic mood to portray his experience of Tokyo at night.

The photographer’s page: https://www.jeanvincentsimonet.com/about