Musings. Ex Libris

One of my favourite love poems is one by John Donne, titled “The Flea.” In this intriguingly lusty poem a flea engineers a consummation between a clandestine couple by mingling their blood it sucks in its own body. Whenever viewing erotic paintings, Donne’s poem springs to my mind. I feel like that sneaky flea, serving as an intermediary between the fateful lovers, and being complicit in the sexual affair whilst not actively engaging in it. Then I check the distance between the painting and me, the discreet distance that prevents any hypnotized ones from absorbing too further and caressing the painting without noticing. I will be more prudent on my definition on eroticism and discuss only female nudity in art. Reclining nudes in painting fascinate me, and for a long time I have wanted to write on a piece that delves into a panoply of naked beauties. My personal favourite has always been Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus (1510). It is the image that most reminiscent of a r...

The sky is ablaze with burning flames and the earth splits asunder- the image of an impending apocalypse looms. Those paintings are impregnated with forebodings of the demise of all living things, and can be served as memento mori- mostly cautionary tales that remind people of their mortality. Landscape paintings that depict the biblical scenes of eternal damnation (most often the Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah) are sometimes reinterpreted as prophetic visions of the end of the world. Painters as early as one in the Romantic period, John Martin, conjured up images that continued to awe and frighten the viewers of today. In John Martin’s The Great Day of His Wrath (1853) a volcano erupts and its ashes and fire surge towards the air, rendering the sky an infernal red. One can easily establish himself into the painting and feel the quake rumble under his feet. The earth takes a topsy-turvydom, where the ground and sky suddenly become one. There are people in the paintin...

The painting, The Procuress (1656), has long been suspected to be atypical of Johannes Vermeer’s painterly style and characteristics: the airiness the painter often favoured gives way to a more limited space and its light treatment, except a more prominent one on the carpet, is confusedly rudimentary, as if the whole canvas was emerging from a film of smoke and sands. Depicted here a brothel scene, but any feelings of seediness or raucousness are diluted, presumably for the sake of decency, which is an undercurrent flows beneath Vermeer’s oeuvre, attests to the Dutch master’s contemporary role as an unsung genius. What is peculiar about this painting is the man on the left, long rumoured to be the self-portrait of the painter, who is seen staring casually into the viewers. The glance is a conspiratorial one, seemingly in complicity with the beholders. This imposed intimacy generates an unnerving effect; unconsciously the viewers do find themselves return the uncanny...

    Very rarely are Frans Hals’ people appeared without cheerful countenances or unpretentious smirks. Happiness reigns Hals’ portraits of people of his time, the aristocracies and the peasants alike. It therefore came not as a surprise if music should be served as an instrument for the paintings’ permeation of felicity. The buffoon in the picture has himself dressed to the festivity, gleefully plucking away the lute, glances sideward as if to engage the attention of the apple of his eye, whom the music is dedicated to. What makes his music tangibly and palpably felt is the tresses of his hair, which scamper about joyfully in midair.           From centuries on painters have tried to materialize the infectiousness of music among the listeners. Or the essence of music could be rendered with ingenious exactitude, as seen in Jan van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece (1432), in which some art historians alleged to identify the precise note...

    The story of Judith beheading Holofernes reveals more violence than female heroism. Paintings or sculptures often depict Judith carrying triumphantly the head of her victim, in a fashion of the notorious Salome. Or she can also be seen stepping suavely on Holofernes’ head, like that in Giorgione’s, in which the heroine leaves her majestic beauty and elegance untarnished even when carrying out the bloodiest business. The pervasive serenity of Giorgione’s painting only augments the lurking horror.   Gustav Klimt whips up a different degree of horror in his depiction of the tale- the kind of horror that, at the sight of the painting the viewers blush. Or they might constantly dither between evading their furtive glance and transfixing boldly their eyes on every telling detail. In Judith I (1901), Klimt introduces a rare sentiment- that of an unreserved sexuality, which contradicts brazenly how Judith was originally portrayed- a widow with unquestionab...

Swiss painter Caspar Wolf was known primarily for his landscape paintings, those with the Alps to be precise. Wolf’s imagery of glaciers, waterfalls, caves or creeks are epic, and so much so that with the aid of the grey tone of colourisation in his paintings, those natural formations seem cold and impervious- a lurking hostility that welcomes not the viewers’ ready absorption. One can imagine standing before a grand painting by Wolf and not awed by its overwhelming magnificence but woefully dwarfed by its monstrosity. Seen here the 1777 painting titled, Devil’s Bridge in the Schoellenen. A precipitous bridge straddles between the gorges, which magnitude dominates the majority of the canvas, and reduces the sky to merely a conical view. A rumbling stream of water races to its still pool, and the boisterous spirit within, reluctant to be transmuted abruptly to insipid sedateness, bubbles still white and frothy. I am immediately reminded of the great Flemish landscape painter, J...

                                                   Walter Sickert, The Camden Town Murder   ( I consider Walter Sickert one of my favourite painters. Despair and despondence exert their tension through every rough-and-brisk brushstroke, whilst danger lurks. Sickert often capitalised on the outcome or aftermath of an incident, rather than detailing the narrative. Although outward emotions are shown, sentimentalism, I assume, is only playing a bit role in Sickert’s paintings. Therefore they often read more like non-fictions, but with the pathos of a Russian epic.) As the lamplights grow dimmer each day the sign of an imminent end of everything looms. To economize what precious little the villagers have left, many of ...