ON PAIN, PAINT & PATHOLOGY
Peacoats and oxfords and scarves wound around necks that swivelled from oil paint to marble in a motion trained by watching tennis matches. Galleries, for all their endless potential for romance, didn't completely insulate against the world outside of their cream, marbled walls. There was no reverie to snatch out of a realm of ether. I had an essay due in three days and a missed phone call to take. Wispy enlightenment would have to wait.
I was looking at The Old Violin, which was, shockingly, an old violin. One surrounded by a sheaf of sheet music, a blue envelope, and a pack of cigarettes. I wanted one to peel off of the
painting and into my hand. I imagined flames from the adjacent painting of the immolation
of Jeanne D’Arc licking away from her agonised body and lighting the end. The tobacco would
be practically fossilised. The paper would dissolve like a gossamer. The smoke would offend
everyone, me included. And that's completely fine.
Anne de Staël, the daughter of Nicolas de Staël, said her father would brood in the corner of his studio before suddenly rising, crossing the floor, and slashing a brush across a canvas — sometimes marking multiple in one movement. Reading that in my cramped dorm room, I felt a pang of longing: to be a deity-in-miniature building your own temples, whilst reigning over a loft hazy with sun, vigour, and paint fumes. De Staël navigated S.I. Hayakawa's ladder of abstraction as easily as one goes to the bathroom in their home at midnight.
Immersing oneself in his Compositions series is having de Staël himself grab the back of
your head, guide you into the world, and hearing a voice saying This is stuff I've seen, unseen,
and repainted... Your nose a millimetre from the canvas, barely touching the mini mountain peak
of a thick, brushed chunk of ochre. The work of art, as a process and as a finality, should be
violent. de Staël's compositions don't exist to placate. They're a deliberate, impasto revolt
against prosaic phenomena and a dip into the realm that drifting souls fruitlessly waited for at the
gallery.
A mistake — seen in discourse concerning the legacy of de Staël and others — is the
romanticising of melancholy in art. The proliferation of sadness as an online aesthetic attests to
this. Of course, the artist may want their consumers to feel what they feel. However, it's easy to
think that one should also go through some tragedy in order to siphon some of whatever makes
the art resonate. The division between the consumer's cathartic release through relatability and
harmful envy of sadness is thin. The work, being a delicate transference of emotion through an
augural idiom, shouldn't be taken and appropriated into a flippant caricature of identification, or worse, be overshadowed by the life of the artist.
It's known that art is received more positively when one is told about the artist's
erraticism. The results cannot be quantified in the manner of "X amount of suffering equals Y
amount of admiration". If idiomatic sadness within art functioned as such, then entering the
Trauma Olympics would be a standard practice in the creative process. The issue arises in that
one may think they must enter into the Trauma Olympics to suffuse their work with what they've
read or heard about in their idols' lives. There's no need to seek out disparity while being in a
place of privilege to avoid it. Perhaps if you were doing a performance art piece à la Abramović.
But suffering, like death, taxes, and the urge to go to the restroom in a bookstore, is inevitable
anyway.
De Staël’s final painting, Le Grand Concert is a gigantic depiction of an orchestra's
unmanned instruments. After seeing a concert, he rushed home and spent the entirety of the
following day working on the piece. Two more days were spent painting. When it was complete,
he burned his sketches and leapt from the upper floor of his atelier at Antibes, the cumulative
act of a life punctured by depression and disappointments. A pseudo-psychologist would
fervently search for signs of depression in this final, unfinished piece. They'd be disappointed.
His son, Gustave de Staël, remarked on the sheer amount of life and the absence of sadness in
his works. However, that statement's accuracy remains unknown. A lifetime of tortured
experience can reside within a shade mixed and slathered. Only the artist can know the precise
amount of themselves poured out as a libation to creative demiurges.
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