A friend tells me that when one is truly resting one doesn’t constantly try to “rationalise” the rest, which immediately dismantles any illusions of being at ease. A step closer reveals undercurrents of fear just where the pulse should be. I’m thinking of the following Jean Valentine poem:
Everything confronts me with who I am, except when I paint. I am calmest then; it is almost a world that even I do not enter.
I’d been meaning to watch the documentary Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint (2019) for several years, and since I knew it would move me immensely, I kept putting it off. Finally watched it a few days ago, and it was yet another desperately needed reminder that this work of looking closely at things and making sense of them in one’s particular way is important and worthwhile. I’m glad I put it off for so long though, because earlier I would’ve accepted it merely as the tale of a woman artist long neglected, one whose spirituality and theosophy were incompatible with the methods of her male contemporaries (“geniuses”) like Kandinsky and Mondrian. Her notebooks fascinate me the most. Voss and Posten write in Hilma af Klint: A Biography (2022) that she used the notebooks primarily to record her “insights into higher worlds” and to “make space for the visions and voices that accompanied her.” She was a part of “the Five,” a group of female artists who gathered for séances and received messages in the form of images and words, which they recorded in their notebooks almost automatically. I find these alternate realities that sustain people to be so powerful and awe-inspiring. The documentary sheds some light on her education in science and mathematics, and how she integrated these into her mediumistic art practice—one critic remarks on the shared scientific and artistic impulse of “observing what is there.” She left piles of notebooks behind, around a hundred of them, with hardly anything personal written in them. It’s such a curious thing. She was ambitious, and she believed in her work, and she kept at it, and the work is astounding.
I enjoyed this talk by Lily Scherlis recently, in which she uses the metaphor of a nutritional mineral that one receives/can access (depending on one’s place in the world) to talk about ambition. My own relationship to it has been fairly latent. Not much was expected of me growing up. I had no competition (nothing that I took seriously, at least) and nothing to prove to anyone. That I liked reading was perfectly enough. I don’t know if it is anymore.
Quite in love with this painting by af Klint:
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the poem. the painting. you.