Musings. Ex Libris

                                                            *Gustav Klimt, Medicine (Hygeia) (1899-1907)* Whenever they feel the need of summoning spirits to unravel the knots that have long entangled their very basic sense of reasoning, they will build a fire on the ground. A clairvoyant will mutter a string of rambling spells, and all participants are made to bow their heads in reverence. Nothing happens much after the spirit appears. Some remarks tentatively that the fire always hisses and flickers whenever the ghost slides pass. But most of them insist they witness nothing during the course of the ritual; anything abnormal that any of them happen to catch a glimpse of is dismissed imperiously as the result of their fantasies. Only the clairvoyant is endowed with the gift of seeing and communicating with the spiri...

                         *Joseph Wright of Derby, An Experiment of a Bird in an Air Pump (1768)* The speckled wall shows an interesting shadow play of figures rushing from one room to the next. The low moanings of a girl are punctuated with the occasional sputter of a candle. A little boy is made to stand guard at the front door, in anticipation of the imminence of the local doctor and his company, a proverbially ingenious apothecary. He has yet witnessed the current state of his bedridden sister- “It’s grave, it’s grave…,” comes the muttering of his father- and he can picture himself doggedly refusing to open his eyes if he was in the room. But anything could be worse than his imagination. And within the blink of an eye the moanings could seize. The doctor raised slightly his eyebrows whilst feeling the girl’s faint breath caress his fingers like veil. The family bends over to read the doctor’s facia...

Some like to paint their world in soft colours, like those in an Impressionistic painting, in which the scenery is always pleasant, tinted with blossoms here and there, and everything is swathed in a gentle haziness seen regularly on a beach resort. For those the world cannot be a better place. Their days can be fairly uneventful if they are unimaginative enough not to be bothered by any uninvited incidents that might put an abrupt termination to their comfortable monotony. The opposite of an ”impressionistic” world is by no means a world of complete black-and-white. I never believe anybody can have a life so utterly devoid of colours, given the fact that today we are living in a turbulent world, anything surprising or incidental can seep into our days despite how hard we try to keep them mundane. A world of garish colours is what I suggest as the opposite of a world of pastel-softness. It best represents the extreme emotions of mankind, be it anger, excitement, amorosity...

    * John Singer Sargent, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit (1882)*  (Born a cosmopolite, French painter Sargent's oil paintings were suffused with a feel of high-brow urbanity. Loneliness and claustrophobia, however, seep in from time to time throughout his oevure when the sparseness of mankind takes over the focus of the expansiveness of space. Whenever seeing a restricted space in a painting it always pricks my curiosity of what lies beyond the frame. And thus in my head the house and the room are imaginatively expanded, but always the room in the picture stays the same, as if the room itself could engulf all of the expansions. We always have that grand house within us; the house which only lends glance of one room but leaves the others shrouded in mystery.) The adults left their children and went to the party so the kids could only entertain themselves by playing in the drawing room. The loftiness of the room was oppressive. One could not st...