How did I end up living an Artful life?

I want to start of by telling you a story, a story about my son. It happened some years ago but I remember as if it was yesterday…

The Blue Violinist, Marc Chagall

When he was about 2 years old we got him a painting for his birthday. It was an oil painting reproduction, a copy of an old master called Marc Chagall. On the painting, pictured a man in bright blue colours who was fiddling the violin. A beautiful work, painted in a style that only Chagall could have done.

My son loved it! No matter how small he was, the combination of shapes, colours and style grabbed him. We made the right choice. The painting was put up on a wall in his room.

An expert of Chagall?

About a year later we decided to go to an exposition in Brussels featuring Magritte. Most of you will know this painter because of his black hats and apples as a face. We strolled around and my son was happily walking around looking way up to all these paintings. Then suddenly he stopped and he said something that sounded like Chagall, my husband and I looked at each other and said sorry what did you say?

My son pointed his finger at this painting that was a Chagall but a completely different one – and clearly repeated “Chagall”. Wow…how could that be…it was indeed a Chagall. The couple next to us that was also enjoying in amazement started speaking to us, how incredible, how could a three year old recognise this so easily?

That was the moment I got inspired, my epiphany.

A Prodigy. Need I say more?

His recognizing of a painter to me has been an inspiration to find my way in the art world and the start of living an artful life.

Art and the Unconscious Mind…an introduction

Who’s who? Pre-schoolers (3-5 yrs) know

Pre-schoolers, kids between the age of 3 and 5, have this miraculous ability to recognise things. Its during that age that your brain starts to form the neural connections to adapt to their social environment.

A study was done showing that kids at the age of 4 can in fact learn to recognise chimps! Can you imagine that…to have the ability to keep chimps apart. To us they all look the same and it is incredibly hard, even for zoo caretakers to keep them apart. Kids at that age can even name them and perfectly know which chimp their dealing with. But then as amazing as this skill is acquired, this ability rapidly disappears by the time kids are 5 years old.

In doing so we eventually tune out the ability to recognize other kind of faces. Which explains why people in the western world and vice versa think people from the Oriental look alike…We simply can’t help it. By the time we reach the age of 5 we lose 90% of the neural connections that were build to recognize faces. This proves that it’s a learned ability, and also could explain how the visual part of your brain functions in relationship to styles in art.

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“When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams — this may be madness. Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

Don Quixote by Honore Daumier
c. 1865 – 1870

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“I am a dreamer. I know so little of real life that I just can’t help re-living such moments as these in my dreams, for such moments are something I have very rarely experienced. I am going to dream about you the whole night, the whole week, the whole year. I feel I know you so well that I couldn’t have known you better if we’d been friends for twenty years. You won’t fail me, will you? Only two minutes, and you’ve made me happy forever. Yes, happy. Who knows, perhaps you’ve reconciled me with myself, resolved all my doubts.

When I woke up it seemed to me that some snatch of a tune I had known for a long time, I had heard somewhere before but had forgotten, a melody of great sweetness, was coming back to me now. It seemed to me that it had been trying to emerge from my soul all my life, and only now-

If and when you fall in love, may you be happy with her. I don’t need to wish her anything, for she’ll be happy with you. May your sky always be clear, may your dear smile always be bright and happy, and may you be for ever blessed for that moment of bliss and happiness which you gave to another lonely and grateful heart. Isn’t such a moment sufficient for the whole of one’s life?”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights

Photo is from the movie Le notti bianche…
Le Notti Bianche is a 1957 Italian film directed by Italian neorealist Luchino Visconti. The movie takes its title and basic plot from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1848 short story, White Nights.

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“I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.”
― Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

Herbert Bayer
Metamorphosis, 1936

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Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?
Alfred Lord Tennyson

Émile Constant Puyo
Sommeil
ca. 1887

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“It is living and ceasing to live that are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere.”
Andre Breton

Photo by Henry Cartier -Bresson.

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Imagination is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow.
William Blake

William Blake (1757-1827)
Hecate or the Three Fates
Watercolor and pen and black ink
1795

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Tears of humanity, tears of humanity,

flowing eternally early and late…

Flowing invisibly, flowing in secrecy,

ever abundantly, ever unceasingly –

flowing as rain flows with autumn finality

all through the night like a river in spate

(1849) Fyodor Tyutchev

translation Peter Tempest

Monument to the Dead (1895) by French sculptor Albert Bartholomé

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“The Flatiron” 1905 by Edward Steichen
1897-1973

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“Adversity draws men together and produces beauty and harmony in life’s relationships, just as the cold of winter produces ice-flowers on the window-panes, which vanish with the warmth.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

Painting: Paul Delvaux (Belgian, Surrealism, 1897–1994)

Harmony (L’Harmonie), 1927.

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