An appreciation of art, expressed in its many drawings, paintings, and solid sculpture forms, has always perplexed me. In my youth, I looked at reproductions of paintings by Paul Klee, Jackson Pollock, Paul Cezanne, Wassily Kandinsky, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Francisco Goya, Rembrandt, Edvard Munch, and many many more and wondered, ‘What am I looking at? What am I looking for? And if I like/don’t like it, why do I like/not like it?’  Edvard Munch’s The Scream appealed to me immediately. As did the bendy watches in Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory. I’ve tried hard with abstract art but could never figure out the whereabouts of Leda or the swan in Cy Twombley’s Leda and the Swan, nor which way was up in Kandinsky’s Composition X. Jackson Pollock’s splatter art left me cold. ‘I could do that,’ I thought. ‘Give me a few tins of paint, a blank canvas, and I could randomly throw paint with the best of them,’ I murmured. I should have tried it. But I didn’t. Electronic engineering grabbed my attention and works of art just became something I encountered randomly rather than by design as I travelled around the world. One notable exception was when I went to Florence for a short break and sought out Michelangelo’s statue of David in the Galleria dell’Accademia. ‘That is an impressive piece of carved marble,’ I thought, pondering how anyone can look at a large rectangular block of marble and ‘see’ the shape it was to become. One small slip of the chisel…

I’ve always admired Munch’s The Scream and, for years, had an A4-sized print torn from a 1970s magazine framed and hanging on the wall of my study. I consider it one of my three masterpieces and will say more about it shortly. More recently, I have been introduced to two other artistic works, one a sketch – Rembrandt’s sketch of A Child Being Taught to Walk – and the other a painting – Goya’s haunting image of The Dog. My introduction to Rembrandt’s sketch occurred in a film, whereas Goya’s painting was in a novel. Let me start with the Rembrandt sketch.

Rembrandt, A Child Being Taught to Walk

A Child Being Taught to Walk
Rembrandt 1656
British Museum, London

I came across this sketch while watching the film, The Artist and the Model ((El Artista y la Modelo), directed by Fernando Trueba in 2012 and featured in one of my Movies for Movie Buffs posts. In the film, the elderly artist (played by veteran French actor, Jean Rochefort) picks up a postcard bearing Rembrandt’s sketch and, in the space of just over four minutes, explains the brilliance of Rembrandt’s skills to the model (played by Spanish actress, Aida Folch). I was fascinated by the artist’s explanation. Here it is, extracted from the subtitle file that accompanies this film.

Artist: Come, I want to show you something.
Model: What?
Artist: Come. Look at this.

Model: It’s nice…
Artist: Nice? That’s all you can say about it? Christ, look again! Observe the way one should observe. Learn to look at things with attention. It’s the best drawing in the world. There’s none better.
Model: Did you do it?
Artist: No, no, of course not. I wish I had. No, Rembrandt did it, a Dutchman. It was done with the tip of a rod, carved and dipped in ink. It’s a masterpiece. A masterpiece with no pretences of being a masterpiece.

Observe the tenderness of the scene. The position of the child’s arms enables you to feel its footsteps… its insecurity and doubt… And even though you don’t see its face, you can feel its joy.
Model: Maybe they’re its first steps…

Artist: Its first steps… Right, that’s what I was saying… Look at the young girl’s arm, drawn in apparent haste and little attention to detail, but who cares? What matters is the love she feels for the child. She holds the baby and notice how she’s about to let it go.
Model: It must be its older sister.
Artist: Must be, but look carefully, even though her back is turned, from the angle of her back and head you can feel her attention focused on the child who laughs excitedly before it begins to walk. How is such wisdom possible?

Model: And this is the mother?
Artist: Yes, yes, undoubtedly. She’s used to this. This isn’t her first time. She’s standing nearby to intervene if necessary. Notice her heavy clothing, it’s coarse, dirty perhaps. And this is the father… [indicating the crouching figure at bottom left.]
Model: He just got home from work and they want him to see the baby take its first steps.
Artist: Right.
Model: And this, who is she?

Artist: A neighbour who happens to be passing, and observes the scene. Do you feel the weight of the bucket, judging from the position of her left arm?
Model: Yeah, you’re right.
Artist: Rembrandt uses her…to recreate that instant, to capture a slice of life, something as simple as life.
Model: How long do you think it took him?
Artist: Oh, four or five minutes, at full speed. It’s almost a photograph, a snapshot… but time doesn’t matter here. It’s the idea, he had the idea… He had the idea.

I have since discovered that this particular sketch by Rembrandt is considered one of his finest creations. This exposition by illustrator and painter Mark Norseth gives a more detailed presentation of why. Check it out: https://www.marknorseth.com/rembrandt-a-child-learning-to-walk/

Francisco Goya, The Dog

The Dog/The Drowning Dog/Dog Overwhelmed by Sand
Francisco de Goya, ~1820
Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid

In 2009, in an essay titled The Mum of Modern Tart: An Essay on Going Deaf, I wrote:

I’ve just finished reading a novel called Deaf Sentence by David Lodge, published in 2008 by Penguin.    The story is about a fictional university professor named Desmond Bates who is slowly going deaf (like me and like the book’s author) and is forced into early retirement because he can no longer make out questions asked by members of his audience. (I had the same trouble in the closing stages of my teaching career).   There are other parallels between Desmond and me in the book, and I had thought to write a short critique of Deaf Sentence, but, as you will see, the essay developed into more than this…

In the book, the author charts the trials and tribulations of his hero, Desmond, as he struggles to survive within his academic environment, family, and his wife’s social groups. There are many laugh-out-loud moments, but one passage attracted my attention.

In Chapter 6, Desmond contemplates the effects of deafness on the artist Goya and composer Beethoven. He wonders whether Goya, an artist whose primary sense requirement would be vision, was less impacted than Beethoven, whose primary sense requirement would have been aural. I’ve long known about Beethoven’s affliction and how, despite deafness, he produced many great musical compositions, but I was unaware of Goya’s hearing impairment and dug a little deeper. Here is the passage in Deaf Sentence that stimulated me to do so and follows Desmond’s musings about Goya’s so-called Black Paintings, murals originally painted on the walls of his house.

Now they’re in the Prado, Saturn Devouring His Children, The Witches’ Sabbath, Fight With Clubs and the rest, predominantly black in pigment as well as subject matter. But the one that always has the most spectators lingering in front of it, intrigued and puzzled, is lighter in colour tone than the others. It’s known as the Dog Overwhelmed by Sand (none of these titles was Goya’s). It might be a modern Abstract Expressionist painting, composed of three great planes of predominantly brownish colour, two vertical and one horizontal, if it wasn’t for the head of a little black dog at the bottom of the picture, painted almost in cartoon style, buried up to its neck in what might be sand, looking upwards pathetically and apprehensively at a descending mass of more of the same stuff. There are lots of theories about what the picture means, like the End of the Enlightenment, or the Advent of Modernity, but I know what it means to me: it’s an image of deafness, deafness pictured as an imminent, inevitable, inexorable suffocation…

The Dog, detail

That last sentence hit a nerve. I have, at times, felt despair, isolation, frustration, and even anger at my hearing impairment. There are times, usually in a social environment, when I struggle with my loss of one of the top five human senses and the minute I found an image of this painting, I too was struck by the expression on the dog’s face. We can only guess at Goya’s intention when he painted this image on one of the walls in his house, Quinta del Sordo (Villa of the Deaf Man) circa 1820, but many have pointed out that the dog appears to be in distress. David Lodge’s interpretation is plausible and, for me, very relatable.

Edvard Munch, The Scream

The Scream
Edvard Munch, 1893
National Gallery, Oslo

Finally, back to Munch’s The Scream, which is undoubtedly one of the world’s most well-known paintings. I cannot recall the first time I saw this painting. I know it was in an art book and was probably when I was in my early twenties, but the appeal was instant: the expression of terror as seen in the gaping mouth and slight sideways direction of the eyes on the face of the ‘screamer’ in the foreground, his (I assume he’s male) hands cupping his gaunt-looking head and body slightly twisted as he senses the approaching presence of the two possibly menacing figures behind him on the bridge. The foreground scene is set off by a background of an intense red and orange sky and dark, turbulent swirling water beneath the bridge. I’m no art critic, but the diagonal composition of the picture appealed to my sense of layout and composition. When you look at the painting, your eyes are first drawn to the figure in the foreground, and then they track back along the bridge to the two people behind him. Then, as it were, they widen out to take in the sky and water.

And here’s the conundrum. My comments above are based on what I observe and my feelings about how the observations build up in layers until I encompass the total image. But, this analysis is subjective. I know people who have an intense dislike for this painting. The instant element of horror causes an adverse reaction, and no amount of persuasion will convince them to see the artistry rather than react to their first impression.

The Scream in the movies
Ghostface in the Scream film franchise
Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone

There you have it. Three paintings I like, where I came across them, and why I like them. Now you know why they are hanging on the wall of my study.

(^_^)