Musings. Ex Libris

Dancers can be like jousters. Fear and excitement wring their hearts so into tangled skein. Fluttered air brushes against their skins like chill. In anticipation of a good, likely interminable, fight both cannot be more well-prepared, grimacing to each other some distances afar as menacing demonstration of their unconquerable audacities. Everything is all so punctiliously rehearsed and choreographed. Even when darkness descends and everything is shrouded in utter invisibility, each dancer will know by heart when to put which foot forward, to which direction she will sway elegantly her supple bodice to duck narrowly from her opponent, and when the time is ripe, she will let her skirt billow like an arch of rainbow, the more fiery and colourful the rainbow the likelier the chance the dancer is going to claim the final victory. It is always something with Art Nouveau that, when beholding a piece that epitomises most substantially the essence of the said art mov...

Heedless of her mother’s gentle call the little girl stares outside, into the very far her gaping eyes can perceive. Always when a door is blown ajar by some intractable wind the little girl will rush towards it in excitement, but stands stationary before the threshold as if awestruck by something wondrous or foreign to her yet unspoiled mind. And the sun will flood in, shafts of them will penetrate her tender heart like swords. Blinded by such gilded haziness the little girl forgets to moan. Nor does the mother, kept busy rocking a restless baby, notice the Lights are creeping into the house like troops in encroachment. The little girl is no sooner aflame as Deities are within her. This painting is a typical example amongst Pieter de Hooch’s oeuvre- like the most characteristic of Vermeer’s, the depth of space is enhanced by the division of the room, and always there is an opened door that leads to the unknown. The focal point should be on the mother but...

One who is too eager to befriend nature will get a cold shoulder. Little wonder. Who can possibly read into nature, so inscrutable and silent? But any human creature, feeling belittled as he is under a sky stretching afar to the infinity, inspires in him suddenly a quixotic urge to conquer the unassailable, to provoke the laconic nature, who sleeps seemingly soundly but with eyes open. Every day the person wakes up to a scenery immutable from the day before, saves that periodically a stroke of lightening galvanizes the slumberous earth, the ear-splitting roar sounds to him like the mocking laugh at his futility of power. Or, fortunately enough, scant stars embellish the darkening sky; their flimsy light nonetheless a sufficient comfort to his desolate soul, disheartened from yet another prolonged day of battles, against the impossible, against the unknown. Like his genre paintings, Gustave Courbet’s landscape scenes are rarely innocent or peaceful. T...