Suppose you grew up in a place that was ravaged with destruction, imagined, imaginary or real, where would you subsequently gravitate?
Actual destruction, I only experienced in utero as my hometown was bombed. Unlike the messy warfare in Iraq, Afganistan or Gaza, there was clean, industrial-like destruction. As bombers came from England, usually at night, the citizenry, notified by sirens, ran to ubiquitous, hefty air raid shelters. The next morning, perhaps sleepy but not otherwise hurt, it could view the new damage to the submarine harbor and facilities where famous battle ships had been built or apartment buildings, in the vicinity to the beach.
Would you settle in a place like California, Louisiana, Florida where nature forces could be unleashed resulting in similar mass destruction? Or would you settle near the Great Lakes where destruction, historically, was limited to a few incidences, effects of tribal warfare and the sinking of ships?
My first experience of the Sleeping Bear Dunes in northern Michigan gave me a sense of awe. Its sandy shore had not been violated by modern warfare, bombings! I found a small wilderness, protected by the DNR as National Lakeshore, largely devoid of signs of human habitation. After photographing the dunes, I finally found the courage to attempt to paint them.
Some of us research their roots, asking where did our ancestors come from? What part of world, Europe, Asia, Africa? Why not instead reinvent your own childhood? Imagine growing up in a place like a fairy tale (without the Orcs) and play.
You may bring your friend to this place of innocence.
Hi Birgit
I think you did a great job, I can see your grandson playing on the beach. To me its not that easy to reinvent my childhood, it makes my feel like a liar. But its never to late, to have a great childhood, since I am at the Great Lakes, it seems to me like a huge playground. The woods, the water, the wildlife is feeding my soul……
Love Monika
Birgit:
You are really onto something if these are your paintings.
I think that I have mentioned that, as a kid of eleven, I saw the pitted submarine pens along the Dutch coast, played in a bombed out ruin in Amsterdam and was mightily impressed by all the bullet holes remaining in Belgium. But this was all voyeurism as I never dodged a thing while growing up.
Jay,
I am glad that you find my paintings interesting, oil on board, 12 x 9. I am now going to focus on learning to draw. I did not catch the intriguing expression on Franny’s face, picture 1.
Posttraumatic stress from war must be awful.
Birgit,
These are extremely expressive paintings: I am intrigued by the “units” of composition that you have chosen. In the first the water is horizontal but disappears at the left, leaving a ragged edge of beige, while the figure on the right is looking out of the painting to the right. The effect is a bit dizzying, while the expression (which you feel you haven’t quite caught) on the face of the figure enhances that sense of unease.
The second painting has a kind of lovely serenity — the horizontals with the single nude child, upright and playful, about to put more water into the watery expanse. The colors add to the peaceful quality of the scene and even the horizontality of the clouds is benign.
The last painting, with its diagonal, has movement and joy, enhanced by both figures, particularly in their arm gestures.
I think you have caught 3 totally different responses to essentially the same scene — and your text seems also to examine these as possibilities. Well done!
As for learning to draw — do it as you need it — such as in doing studies of that face that you are trying to capture. I have found that art allows us to learn as if in a spider-web configuration — you can get from anywhere to anywhere, by following the path that you want to follow. It’s unlike the building block kind of learning, math, for example, where you have to have to basic blocks before you can move on. Enjoy!
Oh, and to comment on childhood — mine seems quite idyllic, although a bit lonely and not at all verbal or intellectual. Maybe that’s why my imagination seems so limited. But being alone a lot made me visually aware, even while nothing in my environment gave me language or encouragement in that visual atmosphere. So it took various traumas and a lot of age to bring me back to that world of visual delight — now I can see far more clearly and closely and with a delight that leaps beyond the mere visual sensitivity that I had as a child. The paintings I’ve been doing on the blog of my home grounds have made me aware of how much I wanted to capture what I saw and loved.
I love the range and the depth of expressions both verbal and visual.
Hadn’t seen your paintings before and love them…and the story. You have
soom much to tell.
June,
The story that I told was prompted by my failure to capture the intelligence, questioning look and beauty in the face of the child. Once I have better mastery at drawing faces, I will try my hand again at her priceless expression. – I, too, am pleased with the second picture. – I have been musing about how to continue with the third picture. It helps me a lot that you pointed out the importance of the arm gestures.
About drawing: A long, long time ago, in a state of altered consciousness (things some of us did back then as young adults), I draw my grandfather’s face. He had died a few decades earlier. I drew his face just right, his eyes, glasses, his nose, his mouth. Needless to say that I had loved him very much. How to unleash this ability again? Talking walks, meditating, looking at beauty? It helps that many things that I considered important earlier, have lost their sheen.
We have in common that we both moved far away from where we grew up. I too grew up in a nonverbal environment. It did not help that I stuttered quite badly until my mid thirties.
I don’t buy what you say about limited imagination. You are a role model for me. And I am glad that you remember the beauty around you as you grew up.
June,
Emailing me, Ginger talked about your comment:
A wonderful image!
Birgit,
Though you may not have captured it just as you’d wish, I definitely find intelligence, questioning, and beauty in the face of the child in the first picture. The questioning and poignancy is enhanced by the hint of surreality, based on the elements June mentioned.
At any party, I’m playing more with the kids than other adults. But I almost never recall my own childhood–or my personal history in general–and have no particular interest in recapturing or re-examining it. Maybe ten years from now…
Perfect, you enable me to explain some more:
I was reminded of the word ‘reinvent’, having read that Geithner is supposed to reinvent himself, after having been one of the people who helped leading the economy astray, as someone different. I doubt that he feels terribly introspective about his past.
Thus, introspection is not necessarily part of claiming or reclaiming childlike ‘innocence ?’, ‘joy’, ‘playfulness’. One way is to At any party, I’m playing more with the kids than other adults . I, by contrast, was a sucker for the intellectual, at parties, I tended to gravitate to whoever spouted the most brilliantly. But now, I am ‘reinventing’ myself by watching the beautiful motion of children and trying to draw and paint that behavior.
I am glad that you detect the surreal in the first pictures. Starting out, I did not think about the surreal. I liked the glare of the sun on water to the left, the color of the water interacting with the color of the child’s clothing. As far as her expression is concerned, I did succeed in painting her big eyes. But I missed out some other feature, a certain wistfulness, a detachment and even perhaps humor. I will try again.
Perhaps, that is a direction that I will go, the surreal. It would allow to show beautiful landscape without the danger of falling into kitsch. Permit this reminiscence, growing up, high school age, I had a horror of ‘Kitsch’, seeing it all around me.
Birgit,
As one who literally had to reinvent herself, I’m not sure I recommend it. It’s better to slide slowly into another mode than be tossed there and told to sink or swim (how’s that for a set of mixed metaphors –snort–)
As for “kitsch” — I was bemused the other day at the art museum to have become totally enthralled with a painting of a beautiful woman. Beautifully painted, beautiful expression, wonderful rendering of fabrics. I can’t even remember the painter’s name — nobody I knew — but as I stood there, I recognized a different attitude in myself. I was no longer slightly sneering about something simply beautiful — a painting out of my realm, not my way, not myself –not even “simple” — not kitsch, exactly, but an object which I would have been leery of admiring a few years before, thinking it verged on the kitschy — and certainly contained no irony!
What???? No Irony??? The nerve!!!