Expressing the core "self" / by JW Harrington

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.