Sergei Chekhonin

Sergei Chekhonin

Bouquet of Flowers

circa 1922

     These are flowers with a rebellious streak in their stems. They defy and put to shame the almost ordinary grace of a tulip, carnation or rose; they dominate the power of colour and shape, with their great lolling heads seemingly overweight with ego. With even their very leaves dwarfing the wicker vase, the flowers appear to drawl in harmony of their unearthly allure not possibly found within the common garden bed. Bound to the same base, their energy of reds, blues, greens and yellows and of their sheer mammoth sizes gives the impression of their strained attempts to rip free their roots in unison, to escape from a mould jailing them to the mundane dirt of the everyday. They want to achieve feats believed incapable by mere plants capped with ludicrous, pompous hats; they want to unsettle the idea that outer prettiness means but inner plainness, or that fragility of form means only weakness of will. After all, this bouquet is indeed composed of papery blossoms, both on and off the canvas, and so it is only understandable that such a group must perform to its audience a sequence of steps unexpected of its kind - a dizzying dance of drooping heads and constant vigilance in order to, one day, finally float off from the page to full-fledged applause.

Lisbeth Zwerger

Lisbeth Zwerger

Little Red Cap was met by a Wolf

circa 2012

     There is a delicacy to this illustration - almost a fragility - that visually enunciates the mounting tension of the scene. The wolf (or should one say Zwerger herself?) cunningly places itself in an agreeable spot by which Little Red Cap will surely pass, unaware and always curious. The wolf’s position is angled and higher than that of the girl, placing the audience at a point from which it, too, fills the role of a spy. With its right paw and chin resting smartly against the mossy tree trunk, the wolf forms an elegant curve from the tip of its tail, up along its wiry back and ending with its darkly-lined, perked ears. Apart from being wonderfully drawn and imbued with an unmistakably sly character, the wolf’s shape brings together the foreground with the middle ground, almost as a foreboding act of drawing Little Red Cap further up the hill towards the story’s climactical meeting between predator and prey. The space behind the girl is intentionally blank: stretching out and beyond her and the receding trees, it represents the trouble-less, wolf-free life that she leaves in her wake, as well as her innocence of youth. It is now only a question of what will soon happen after she looks up and into the eyes of her stalker for the first time, and whether or not it is truly a wolf, or in fact something more.

Art of Apulia

Apulian Italy, by unknown artist(s)

Oriental (stylised) Decorative Ivory Plaque (depicting reclining bathing women in conversation)

circa 600s or 500s B.C.

     In order to understand a bit of the character of this little plaque, it is important to question what its original purpose might have been. Certain clues of its function lie on its very skin, plainly visible, while the discovery of others rely on intuition and reasoning, like reading between the lines of a story book. 

     One might begin with the subjects themselves: each seems to wear only a striated headdress over their hair (notice the opposing textures) and a lower body garment. It is unclear as to whether these are truly robes, however - as easily as it is to assume that the figures are actually male, it is equally possible to assume that their ‘clothing’ is actually water, stylised into three undulated waves to indicate the act of bathing. It is also interesting to consider that the figures are as animated as they are rigid. Notice that while their hand gestures and reposing postures denote close interaction with one another (are they arguing? singing?), their bodies nevertheless fall into a pattern that could easily be repeated onto consecutive plaques. The central subject separates its two companions on its left and right sides, each of whom are surely meant to appear identical, despite minor deficiencies in the artist(’s)’ handiwork and in the quality of the ivory. Perhaps this implies that this plaque was once part of a larger collection, one that bordered the brilliantly-coloured tiled walls of a lost city’s private baths? Its material, ivory, and its figures’ genderless though refined, delicate countenances point towards the plaque’s usage within Apulian society’s upper classes - places in which the everyday, common people would not likely set foot, whether it be for their lack of money or pure blood, or for their supposed crude understanding of what separates art from mere craft. Though only a matter of guesswork, this also reveals the irony that riddled the relationships between people of such societies, past and present, and how it is only a question of perspective that discerns one thing from another.

Ferdinand Hodler

Ferdinand Hodler

Nu Féminin en mouvement (sketch for l’Émotion)

circa 1902-03

     This woman has a classical grace about her figure. She is nude with but a long drape of indistinct cloth shielding her modesty, and she poses with an air of flirtation, sensuality. The bay of skin flowing from her outstretched foot, up along her thigh and rounded hip and then to her slender bosom and neck, wholly connects the woman as not just a body of singular beauty and proportion, but also as a muse - as an ideal hidden within the everyday mundane. Her shape is attractively familiar; her gesture is natural yet poised, with one hand accentuating the unique delicacy of the female body, the other drifting down nearer her belly, perhaps to instinctually cradle the area in which life is created. Her shoulders also feign a sensualness: slightly tensed, they appear to express strain or uncertainty, with an added touch of allure in the way they relate to the position of her neck. Craned away from the viewer, her face almost entirely hidden, the neck joins body with mind, soul with character. Hodler foreshortened her face, making her strong jaw and upper neck all the more feminine by softening and thickening them together as one confident contour. Like a statue, like an ethereal figure oblivious of common plagues and worries, this nude is elevated from being just a common girl to being interchangeably that and more. She is forever faceless and flat, but she has a timeless charisma that runs deeper than a mere sheaf of paper.