I’ve read and been told again and again that meaningful art (music, painting, or writing) must recognize some key aspects of the artist’s being that need expression. I find that challenging to accomplish in a form that I find visually appealing.
One possible way forward springs from my recent reading of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s 2019 monograph So Much Longing in So Little Space: The Art of Edvard Munch. At one point Knausgaard repeats a quote from Munch, concerning his “Frieze of Life” paintings from the 1890s (when he was in his 30s):
“’I painted only what I remembered without adding anything to it – without the details that I no longer saw. Hence the simplicity of the pictures – the apparent emptiness. By painting the colours and lines and shapes I had seen in an emotional state – I wished to recapture the quivering quality of the emotional atmosphere like a phonograph. This is how the pictures of the Frieze of Life came into being’” [Bischoff, p. 63].
In Knausgaard’s words, “he painted his memories and sought to recapture the emotions they had awakened in him at the time. These were defining memories, or they became such when he painted them; they were the basis of his understanding of himself, in them he could seek out what had made him who he was” [135].
“The inner world is unconveyed -- that is its nature. The conveying of it, that is, the fiction or the story, is our way of understanding the self” 6]. In this process, one may create something that is at once extremely specific to oneself, and universal in its capture of a feeling.
I’m trying this now, in a set of six (perhaps eight) small studies on paper. If I find any of them appealing, I’ll share them.
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Ulrich Bischoff (2016, first pub. 1988). Edvard Munch: Images of Life and Death. New York: Taschen.
Karl Ove Knausgaard (2019). So Much Longing in So Little Space: The Art of Edvard Munch. New York: Penguin Books.
