Ut pictura poesis

I moved to this big old house in Brunswick two years ago. I love the Victorian style, but it has its quirks. However, if you’ve ever lived in a Victorian house, it’s hard to live anywhere else. The woodwork, the archways that usher visitors elegantly from one room to another, the ornate decoration, the lush textures and heaviness of the interiors - they are self-conscious features of such homes. They all call attention to themselves. They seduce the viewers. We all move closer and lean over the brocade couches in the parlor, feel the urge to run fingers over the flocked wallpaper, call attention to the dyes employed to color velvet drapes, the stains and oils lavished on mahogany. We can’t help ourselves. We want to touch, smell, taste, we want to imagine the making of such material wealth. We can’t help ourselves, even while we might rebuke the class mentality embodied in the Victorian aesthetic. This is a world of dreams and imagination.

My natural aesthetic preferences are, to be honest, slightly different, and to be honest, I am mostly drawn to the way space is configured in the houses that have so much space to work with. I get claustrophobia in a one-bedroom studio. Because there are high walls and a lot of rooms in my Victorian abode, there is a large area for displaying art. I do have a few pieces of my own amateur work, although I get embarrassed at the thought of hanging my pieces in the same area as the rich gold and black and carmine portraits I inherited with the purchase of the house. There are a number of paintings that came with it, and I can’t understand how they were not removed by the previous owner. Maybe they’re worth something. I ought to get them appraised, I know.

One of the paintings is over the mantelpiece. I look at it a lot and know the painter was Théodore Géricault, who didn’t live long and was pre-Victorian, but who produced some works that are extremely haunting. I wonder if he infected any of his paintings with tuberculosis, the disease that killed him, but figure it’s not likely. I mean, TB doesn’t work like the Black Death from the fourteenth century, after all. It’s also morbid to even consider the portrait is diseased and it’s in bad taste to even think about it a little bit. The name of the painting has been translated from French as Madwoman or Insane Woman. The latter translation makes it clear that the woman in the portrait is not angry (mad), but rather out of her mind (insane). On the other hand, if you look closely, you pretty much can figure out hat both her insanity and her rage are deftly combined in her expression, mixed and distributed over her aging, wrinkled visage by the colors from the artist’s palette. Mixed media, mixed emotions. Not that Géricault used mixed media, though. I just felt like bringing that up.

I want to give this crazy, angry lady a name. She may never have had a name, just a face and a bonnet. Supposedly she was full of envy, and her grotesque expression is probably a moral lesson. Maybe she’s Antoinette. Or Eloïse. Or Aurore. I think it’s better just to call her Marie. We have begun to have some interesting conversations and so maybe the woman likes it that I’ve baptized her Marie. Lately she’s begun to ask me in, showing people have the wrong impression of her as mentally unstable. I don’t have to jump or stand on a chair. All I do is stand facing her and I am able to walk inside the frame. I kid you not. There is like a magic portal above the mantelpiece and I have free, easy access if I just concentrate.

The other paintings don’t seem to have that characteristic of inviting me in. I know because I’ve tried. I really like the horses in one work, and the ladies lounging in the countryside, or the stormy sea in the others (although I don’t try too hard to enter the latter.) I try to get close enough to the dog to pat it, or find the walkway through the lush garden, but none of these other paintings works like the one over the mantelpiece. That one is much more seductive and has much more content once you’re inside, despite only showing a woman’s face and upper body. I don’t mind. Marie has a lovely garden with low stone walls, shady paths, and both a dog AND a cat, plus a couple of hens that lay eggs. The animals’ names aren’t known to me yet, but I’m sure Marie will tell me eventually. I’m still perfecting the process of looking at her face, then past her shoulders, which is where I go when I go in there.

Disappointed with this single option for strolling through paintings, I have given up trying to open them where they’re usually hung and have decided to put them over the mantelpiece where Marie normally resides. Can you believe it? It works! Of course, when I first returned them to their designated walls, I expected things to go back to their original state, but I was mistaken. Once they had been hanging for a certain amount of time over the hearth, even when removed and restore to their respective spots, the other paintings retained the ability to open up. I can go to them - not abusing them nor wearing out my welcome - the horses, dogs, even the ships, are now available to me for petting, walking leisurely, or even getting seasick with the rolling waves.

The opening must be learned, apparently. The paintings need to be exposed to the right space in order to extend themselves like accordions. This is quite odd, of course, but I’m getting used to it. The space above the mantelpiece must be a portal. A magic one. Here, in my Victorian home, art doesn’t imitate life. Art IS life, and I am a very special guest. I feel safe when inside one of my paintings, safest yet when next to Marie, who seems to be sheltering me.

I have had guests on two occasions and they really laughed at me when I tried to describe what was going on in my house and in the paintings. I mean I tried really hard, going up close to the works in heir frames, not touching them, but describing in minute detail all the things in them. I used words to portray shapes and hues, scents, sounds. It was easy, because from inside you get an extra accurate view. One garden is particularly attractive and the fragrance of lavender and honeysuckle are so strong I can’t believe my visitors are unable to pick it up, but they aren’t. I wonder if they suffer from anosmia. 

I must have been too enthusiastic about trying to share my sensual experience with my visitors. After the two groups of guests had come, others I invited have found ways to put off the visits. They laugh nervously and tell me they’ll let me know when their schedules are freed up.

The well-meaning intentions I had finally have gotten me in trouble. It isn’t fair. All I wanted, want, is for them to enjoy my art in the same way as I do: totally, profound, in depth. I must have tried to plan three or four more ‘soirées’ as they used to call them in the nineteenth century, never with any success. Now my friends (at least I thought they were friends) have gotten together and reported me. That’s what I hear. The authorities came after me one day. They really came after me, insisting I needed a psychological examination. I refused. Enjoying art is not a crime, that I’m aware of.

I have begun to lock my door, even in the daytime. It’s not something I used to do, but I have begun to feel unsafe. It occurs to me to ask Marie what to do or, better yet, I might ask her to hide me from my aesthetically-challenged neighbors. This plan doesn’t seem to be very viable, since from time to time it is necessary to go to the grocery store or the pharmacy. Marie’s dog needs food as well. It is the least I can do, offer the dog (and kitty) food as a show of gratitude for her keeping me safe from those who are not able to understand the magic portal.

I am really trying to analyze what is happening with my paintings. I have been studying many theories of art, starting with Horace. I also have gone through histories of artistic periods, their objectives and techniques. Nothing comes even remotely close to explaining the phenomenon that is occurring in my Brunswick home. I have read Berger’s Ways of Seeing and About Looking, and half a dozen other essays on how art does what it does. W.J.T. Mitchell’s “Ut Pictura Theoria: Abstract Painting and Language” from his book Picture Theory was an additional source, but has brought no further understanding of why I obviously have a batch of very special paintings, in a very special house, with a special portal that has taught me how to “be” with (and in) a work of art. What is going on with me is far more powerful than the old Dorian Gray experience!

Rebecca Chamberlain came to my attention when she wrote that artists’ brains lead them to see the world differently in an article I didn’t otherwise understand: “Drawing on the right side of the brain: A voxel-based morphometry analysis of observational drawing.” Too many complicated words. However, I am not an artist, as much as I’ve dabbled over the years, mostly with acrylics and gouache over the years. Instead, my brain has been pretty normal, not restructured for the visual creator’s process of capturing the world. I just ‘get it’ and want to get as close as possible to what is inside the frame. Other people apparently do not agree with my goal. They point at me and whisper behind raised hands, they stared.

Today I can see it is happening. The thing I’ve been fearing. A group has started coming toward me, acting as if they want to force me into a car and transport me to Acadia Hospital for a full psychological examination. Clearly the invitations to view my home and art collection are never going to be accepted. Not now.

I am watching from a distance as the group, framed by the houses on either side of the intimate street, moves nearer. I have the image of The Aquelarre or ‘Witches’ Sabbath’ by Goya flashing through my thoughts and have considered running. The only possible hiding place that occurrs to me is in Marie’s garden, where her image will block out my form to any invaders into my home. That would be dangerous. I can just imagine them breaking in wrenching the art from the walls, lighting a bonfire to burn it all. That can’t be allowed to happen. It can’t happen.

I have quickly flipped through in my mind all the art history and aeshetic theories I can recall, which is a considerable amount, but have succumbed to the sad realization that it is too late now to convince all these mad and maddened people of the power of art. I have been generous in sharing that power - too generous. Now it is necessary to protect my treasures with their unlimited spaces and their exquisite beauty, which to a great degree is derived from their ability to go beyond the everyday world. Above all, I have to protect Marie after all she has done for me.

The maddened crowd - I now see them as rabble - is still coming my way. I have only one recourse, and only one shot at this, at getting it right. I summon the right side of my brain with its ability to, as they say, think outside the box. In this case, it might be more accurate to say, think outside the frame.

Now I am conjuring up numerous tubes of paint, all shades, plus a variety of brushes. I have gotten a glass of water, a spatula (just in case), a few paint rags, a texture tool or two. I get to work, anxiously, hurrying, spurred on by my mission. I’ve never done this before, so this could be a real disaster despite my good intentions. They’re coming closer. I know I have to work fast. This might not work under those conditions…

I have made my brain say the attackers are a painting. Now I focus as I pass through them.

Done! I’ve painted them into a scene of rioters like an illustration out of a Charles Dickens novel, particularly from The Tale of Two Cities. They can move because they’re only a painting. Everybody knows a painting doesn’t move. Instead, it’s what inside or behind the painting that moves and calls to the senses.

Thank goodness that along with art history, I’ve read Virginia Woolf, the most brilliant woman ever to. She inspires me, especially with this observation: 

How many times have people used a pen or paintbrush because they couldn’t pull the trigger? 

Woolf also tells us that women writers must: 

kill the aesthetic ideal through which they themselves have been 'killed' into art.

I am a woman. I am the author of this story and I have used paintbrushes and paint to kill my attackers, to kill them and leave them unable to do any harm to me, my art, or my magic portal in the lovely Victorian home where I reside. My attackers all seem to be men, so I am not going against Woolf’s tenet that women need to defend themselves against being ‘killed into art’. 

The punishment of my aggressors creates for me the ability to contemplate them in their now-rigid state. Like I do with Marie, I can walk through their static surface to what lies on the other side of them. Once on the other side, I will be safe. Safe and free to enjoy my art as I please.