Jean Siméon Chardin, still life, painting, tools of the painter
Jean Siméon Chardin, still life, painting, tools of the painter
Master copy, Evening Landscape: A Windmill by a Stream by Jacob Van Ruisdael (around 1650), Process, Materials, Reference Texts
Read MoreFrame, art, history of the frame, presentation, border between reality and representation
Read MoreNov 10, 2022
Info on ancient pigments as told by William Smith in A dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, 1849, pigments, painting techniques
Read MoreNov 06, 2022
France Culture : Les œuvres d’art qui ont changé le monde
Épisode 1/5 : Les raisins de Zeuxis
Au tournant du Ve et du IVe siècle avant J.-C, deux des plus grands peintres de la période classique de l’Antiquité, Zeuxis et Parrhasios, se lancèrent un défi public. La question de l’imitation, ou plus précisément de la perfection technique du trompe l’œil, était au cœur de leur dispute. Les deux maîtres confrontèrent donc leur savoir en produisant deux réalisations extraordinaires qui sont restées dans l’histoire...
Les questions sur le réalisme, le mimétisme, la part de l'art et la part de l'invention, les critères d'évaluation d'une oeuvre d'art soulevés par ce récit fondateur n'ont guère perdu de leur actualité.
Avec Fabien Vallos, théoricien, traducteur, éditeur, artiste et commissaire indépendant.
Textes lus par Nathalie Kanoui.
Chargée de recherche : Maurine Roy
Production: Jean de Loisy
Réalisation: Laurent Paulré
Collaboration: Thierry Beauchamp
Oct 26, 2022
CHARLES BEAUDELAIRE
LE JET D'EAU
three translations
Le Jet d'eau
Tes beaux yeux sont las, pauvre amante!
Reste longtemps, sans les rouvrir,
Dans cette pose nonchalante
Où t'a surprise le plaisir.
Dans la cour le jet d'eau qui jase,
Et ne se tait ni nuit ni jour,
Entretient doucement l'extase
Où ce soir m'a plongé l'amour.
La gerbe épanouie
En mille fleurs,
Où Phoebé réjouie
Met ses couleurs,
Tombe comme une pluie
De larges pleurs.
Ainsi ton âme qu'incendie
L'éclair brûlant des voluptés
S'élance, rapide et hardie,
Vers les vastes cieux enchantés.
Puis elle s'épanche, mourante,
En un flot de triste langueur,
Qui par une invisible pente
Descend jusqu'au fond de mon coeur.
La gerbe épanouie
En mille fleurs,
Où Phoebé réjouie
Met ses couleurs,
Tombe comme une pluie
De larges pleurs.
Ô toi, que la nuit rend si belle,
Qu'il m'est doux, penché vers tes seins,
D'écouter la plainte éternelle
Qui sanglote dans les bassins!
Lune, eau sonore, nuit bénie,
Arbres qui frissonnez autour,
Votre pure mélancolie
Est le miroir de mon amour.
La gerbe épanouie
En mille fleurs,
Où Phoebé réjouie
Met ses couleurs,
Tombe comme une pluie
De larges pleurs.
— Charles Baudelaire
The Fountain
My poor mistress! your lovely eyes
Are tired, leave them closed and keep
For long the nonchalant pose
In which pleasure surprised you.
In the court the bubbling fountain
That's never silent night or day
Sweetly sustains the ecstasy
Into which love plunged me tonight.
The sheaf unfolds into
Countless flowers
In which joyful Phoebe
Puts her colors:
It drops like a shower
Of heavy tears.
Thus your soul which is set ablaze
By the burning flash of pleasure
Springs heavenward, fearless and swift,
Toward the boundless, enchanted skies.
And then it overflows, dying
In a wave of languid sadness
That by an invisible slope
Descends to the depths of my heart.
The sheaf unfolds into
Countless flowers
In which joyful Phoebe
Puts her colors:
It drops like a shower
Of heavy tears.
Oh you whom the night makes so fair,
How sweet, bending over your breast,
To listen to the endless plaint
Of the sobbing of the fountains!
Moon, singing water, blessed night,
Trees that quiver round about us,
Your innocent melancholy
Is the mirror of my love.
The sheaf unfolds into
Countless flowers
In which joyful Phoebe
Puts her colors:
It drops like a shower
Of heavy tears.
William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954)
The Fountain
My darling of a sweetheart, close,
For a long time, your great, tired eyes,
Keeping them in that languid pose
Where pleasure took them by surprise.
Out in the court the fountain chatters
And does not cease by day or night.
The swoon of ecstasy it flatters
In which love plunges me tonight.
Its sheaf uprears
A myriad flowers,
While Phoebe sheers
Through pearl-flushed hours,
To rain down tears
In glittering showers.
So does your flashing soul ignite
In lightnings of voluptuous bliss
And rushes reckless up the height
As though the enchanted sky to kiss;
Then it relaxes, grows more fine,
And in sad languor falls apart
Down an invisible incline
Into the deep well of my heart.
Its sheaf uprears
A myriad flowers,
While Phoebe sheers
Through pearl-flushed hours,
To rain down tears
In glittering showers.
O you whom night so beautifies
How sweet unto your breast to bend
And hear the water as it sighs
Into the ponds without an end
Moon, singing water, blessed night
And trees that tremble up above —
Your melancholy charms my sprite
And is the mirror of my love.
Its sheaf uprears
A myriad flowers,
While Phoebe sheers
Through pearl-flushed hours,
To rain down tears
In glittering showers.
— Roy Campbell, Poems of Baudelaire (New York: Pantheon Books, 1952)
The Fountain
Thine eyes are heavy. Let them close.
Lie without opening them. Lie
Still in the lovely thoughtless pose
Where pleasure found thee. The long cry
Of moonlit waters that caress
The evening, languorous as thou art,
Lives on: So does the tenderness
Love has awakened in my heart.
The fountain leaps and flowers
In many roses,
Whereon the moonlight flares.
Their crystal petals, falling,
Falling for ever,
Are changèd to bright tears.
Even thus thy spirit, briefly ht
With the strange lightnings of desire,
Once more into the infinite
Flings up its pure forgetful fire,
As if the dusty earth to flee —
And blossoms there, and breaks apart,
And falls, and flows invisibly
Into the deep night of my heart.
The fountain leaps and flowers
In many roses,
Whereon the moonlight flares.
Their crystal petals, falling,
Falling for ever,
Are changèd to bright tears.
O thou, so fair and so forlorn,
How sweet, my lips upon thy breast,
To hear within its marble urn
The water sobbing without rest.
O moon, loud water, lovely night,
O leaves where the soft winds upstart,
O wild and melancholy light,
Ye are the image of my heart.
The fountain leaps and flowers
In many roses,
Whereon the moonlight flares.
Their crystal petals, falling,
Falling for ever,
Are changèd to bright tears.
— George Dillon, Flowers of Evil (NY: Harper and Brothers, 1936)
PAUL VALERY
FRAGMENTS FROM NARCISSUS
Narcissus Speaks
To placate the shades of Narcissa.
0 brothers, mournful lilies, I am dying of beauty
For having desired myself in your nakedness,
And, Nymph, it is to you, 0 Nymph of the fountains, I come offering vain tears to this utter silence.
A great calm listens to me, where I listen to hope.
The voice of the springs changes, and speaks to me of evening; I hear the silvery grass growing in the holy shade,
And the traitorous moon lifts up her mirror
Even into the secrets ofthe exhausted fountain.
And I! Flinging me down bodily in these reeds, I am dying, 0 sapphire, of my own sad beauty!
I can love nothing now but the bewitching water
Where I forgot laughter and the rose of former times.
How I rue your pure and fatal glitter, Fountain so softly surrounded by me,
Where my eyes drank in, from a mortal azure, My own image crowned with moistened flowers!
Ah, that image is vain, and tears are eternal!
Through the blue of the woods and their fraternal arms
A tender gleam of time ambiguous exists,
Where from an ember of day is fashioned a betrothed
Naked, on the pale space where the water draws me.... Delicious demon, desirable and icy!
Here in the water is my body of moon and dew, Form compliant still opposed to my gaze!
Here are my silvery arms of purest gestures....
My slow hands weary in the adorable gilding
Of luring that captive bound among the leaves,
And I shout the names of unknown gods to the echoes!..
Farewell, lost image on the enclosed, calm pool, Narcissus... the very name is a tender perfume
To the soothed heart. To the shades of the departed, Shed on this empty tomb the funereal rose.
Be my lip the rose shedding a kiss's petals Bringing a gradual peace to a shade beloved, For night speaks in a whisper, far and near,
To the flower-cups filled with shadows and light slumbers.
But the moon trifles among the lengthening myrtles.
I worship you, under those myrtles, oh uncertain Flesh, sadly offering your flower to solitude, Wondering at yourself in the sleeping forest's mirror. In vain I unbind myself from your sweet presence,
The deceitful hour is kind to limbs stretched on the moss.
It fills the deep wind with a solenm bliss.
Farewell, Narcissus....Die! Twilight is here, At the heart's sighing my image undulates,
The flute, against the entombed azure, warbles Longings of the sounding herds as they go their way. But on the mortal chill where a star is lit,
Before the mist forms a gradual tomb,
Accept this kiss breaking the water's fatal calm!
Hope alone can avail to cleave this crystal.
Let the ripple ravish me on the breath that banishes And may my breath inspire some slender flute-song Whose carefree player thinks of me kindly!...
Faint away, vanish, troubled divinity!
And pour out to the moon, humble and lonely flute
Our silvery tears in your diversity.
Quote by Andrew Joron in Flowing Uphill
"I think there is an obvious and not at all unlikely similarity between language and water: water is like language, language is like water. Both are seemingly transparent, ubiquitous, and necessary to sustain our life.
And of course the underlying meaning of water is that it is very nearly meaningless: tasteless, odorless, shapeless, its properties are very hard to nail down. Very like the shapelessness, the actual meaningless of language considered as a whole. For the sum total of all possible statements in language is not one big meaningful statement, but a meaningless multiplicity of statements. So, in considering what water really is, what language really is, we are suddenly closer than we might wish to the primeval chaos.
The Deluge drawings attempt to do the impossible, to capture and convey all of the effects of nonlinear motion by means of line drawings—that is, to represent that which is inherently fleeting by that which is inherently fixed. Leonardo’s Deluge drawings come close to abstract expressionism in their violent registration of water in a state of crisis.
And like the visual arts, poetic language also has undergone an evolution that brings it closer to the chaos patterns that Leonardo first observed in the movement and the self-entanglement of water. Once poetic language was released from the constraint of having to tell the stories of gods and kings and later, of having to express individual and social identity, it began to discover—or rediscover—its sources in the mysterious movement of language itself, in the manifestation of a meaning in words that goes somehow beyond words. In the modernist and the postmodernist poem, language is finally manifested as a self-exceeding system, and to explain what I mean by this, I’m going to resort, very much in the spirit of Leonardo, to the properties of water.
Now, self-exceeding systems are those systems that are capable of pushing themselves into a new state of being. A simple system, such as a clock or a pendulum, is not capable of such transformation; only complex, nonlinear systems are. Water and language are both classic examples of complex systems, and as such they have many properties in common—properties that, for me, relate directly to poetic attempts to say the unsayable.
In poetic language, meaning overflows or exceeds its own condition, and a saying of the unsayable takes place."
https://www.poetryfoundation.o...
Quote by Arthir Sze in On Poetry and Water
In China, water is one of the five elements and symbolizes yin, the primeval female principle. In the I Ching, or Book of Changes, the trigram for water is a set of stacked lines composed of a broken line at the bottom, a solid line, then a broken line. It is generated through a divination process that incorporates chance. In this cosmology, water is not an assemblage but, rather, a force—“Water flows to what is wet.” The water trigram helps to highlight that everything is in motion, and that each moment is unique.
If water is beginningless beginning and endless end, if water has no shape of its own but can take any shape, it has infinite possibility.
Texts provided by Poetry Foundation, link to text no longer available
Leonardo Da Vinci, A Deluge, 1517-18, black chalk on paper
https://www.rct.uk/collection/...
Quotes from Gaston Bachelard, Eau et les Rêves
...sous les images superficielles de l’eau, une série d’images de plus en plus profonde, de plus en plus tenaces…Il reconnaitra dans l’eau dans la substance de l’eau, un type d’intimité…l’eau est aussi un type de destin…l’eau est vraiment l’élément transitoire. L’être voue à l’eau est un être en vertige. Il meurt à chaque minute, sans cesses quelque chose de sa substance s’écroule. La mort quotidienne est la mort de l’eau. L’eau coule toujours, l'eau tombe toujours, elle finit toujours par sa mort horizontale…La peine de l’eau est infini.
Je retrouve toujours la même mélancolie devant les eaux dormantes, une mélancolie très spéciale qui a la couleur d’une mare dans un foret humide, une mélancolie sans oppression, songeuse, lente, calme.
Une goutte d’eau puissante suffit pour créer un monde et pour dissoudre la nuit.
…une eau qui va du printemps a l’hiver et qui reflète aisément, passivement, légèrement, toutes les saisons.
La dialectique de l’eau
Le complexe de Caron et Le complexe d’Ophélie
Caractère presque toujours féminin
L’eau et la pureté
L’eau et la violence
Le langage des eaux est une réalité poétique directe
Elle a un corps, une âme, une voix,…une réalité poétique complète
« Les évènements les plus riches arrivent en nous bien avant que l’âme s’en aperçoive. Et, quand nous commençons a ouvrir les yeux sur le visible, déjà nous etions depuis longtemps adhérents à l’invisible. » D’Annunzio, Contemplation de la Mori
…l’eau sert à naturaliser notre image, à rendre un peu d’innocence et de naturel a l’orgueil de notre intime contemplation….
Le miroir de la fontaine est donc l’occasion d’une imagination ouverte. Le reflet un peu vague, un peu pali, suggère une idéalisation. Devant l’eau qui réfléchit son image son image, Narcisse sent que sa beauté continue…Le miroir de verre…donne un image trop stable.
…Narcisse va donc a la fontaine secrète, au fond des bois. La seulement, il sent qu’il est naturellement double ; il tend les bras, il plonge les mains vers sa propre image, il parle à sa propre image, il parle à sa propre voix. Echo n’est pas une nymphe lointaine.
Près de la fontaine prend ainsi naissance un narcissisme idéalisant… »Je suis tel que je m’aime. »
Cette fraicheur qu’on éprouve en se lavant les mains au ruisseau s’étend, s’empare de la nature entière.
La fraicheur imprègne le printemps par ses eaux ruisselantes ; elle valorise toute la saison du renouveau.
Complexe de Nausicaa…nymphes
L’eau évoque la nudité naturelle.
Le cygne, en littérature est un ersatz de la femme nue.
Contempler l’eau, c’est s’écouler, c’est de dissoudre, c’est mourir.
L’eau en sa jeune limpidité est un ciel renverse ou les astres prennent une vie nouvelle.
Ainsi l’eau, par ses reflets, double le monde, double les choses.
Le passe de notre amé est une eau profonde.
Alors la nuit est substance comme l’eau est substance. La substance nocturne va se mêler intimement à la substance liquide. Le monde d’air va donner ses ombres au ruisseau….L’eau est une substance qui boit ; elle avale l’ombre comme un noir sirop .
L’eau est ainsi une invitation à mourir ; elle est une invitation à une mort spéciale qui nous permet de rejoindre un des refuges matériels élémentaires.
« Partir, c’est mourir un peu. »
L’eau est l’élément de la mort jeune et belle, de la mort fleurie, et, dans les drames de la vie et de la littérature, elle est l’élément de la mort sans orgueil ni vengeance, du suicide masochiste. L’eau est le symbole profond, organique de la femme qui ne sait que pleurer ses peines et dont les yeux sont si facilement noyées de larmes.
La mer est maternelle, l‘eau est un lait prodigieux
L’eau nous porte. L’eau nous berce. L’eau nous endort. L’eau nous rend notre mère.
L’eau nous invite aux voyages imaginaires.
Continuité matérielle de l’eau et le ciel…l’eau porte
L’eau le matériau pure par excellence.
C’est parce que l’eau a une puissance intime, qu’elle peut purifier l’être intime .
L’union du sensible et du sensuel vient soutenir une valeur morale…Elles ont marque la jeunesse de notre esprit. Elles sont nécessairement une réserve de jeunesse.
Les mythes de la naissance, l’eau dans sa puissance maternelle
La parole de l’eau
Nous n’hésitons pas donc pas a donner à plein sens a l’expression qui dit la qualité d’une poésie fluide et animée, d’une poésie coulée de source.
Leonardo da Vinci, A deluge, pen and black ink on paper
Many of you have followed the artistic process that I have shared on social media during the past six months. Besides investigating what meaning painting has for me personally, and for society as a whole, my research has examined the creative process itself. I have aimed to pursue a studio practice that is open and fluid without set boundaries – where the continuity and linearity of the artistic process is continuously called into question, so to eliminate the urge to strive for a final goal.
I've allowed my process to be completely open, permitting it to change almost daily as I responded to what I saw, read, or experienced in both the real and virtual world. By applying various rules, I've challenged myself to keep the process going. I've also been fortunate to engage with artists, art historians, and other persons in various forms of dialogues relating to art. This has stimulated me to delve deeper. Further, I've resisted my urge to classify and censor my artistic output. Social media has served as both a recording device and as a means of keeping my process in a continuous destabilizing state of flux. My aim for this was to mirror, in my artistic practice, what is actually happening in the real world and to question my own habits and preconceived ideas. Through the means of art, painting, and intuition, I sought to explore hidden parts of myself. It is true that painting, because of its fluidity, may be one of the best ways to explore intuition and the subconscious of the mind. Already, after six months, I have a better understanding of my own feelings as they relate to painting and my art-making process in general.
However, when an art process relies solely on intuition and feelings, it feels very destabilizing. There are days when the process itself makes me feel "dizzy" or "disoriented" due to the lack of structure and boundaries. One also feels very exposed and vulnerable as if there is nothing there but a feeling of emptiness. It almost touches on the sublime, meaning infinitely beautiful, but at the same time, terrifying. After engaging in this for months, I feel more and more at ease; however, it still feels like a balancing act. Apparently, these feelings are familiar to artists exploring this type of creative output.
Below are a couple of quotes from an essay written by Theresa Hardman called 'Understanding Creative Intuition:'
The collective unconscious specifically is, according to Jung, the source of intuition and instinct. In his theory of the collective unconscious, Jung describes it as a fluid, sympathetic, 'boundless expanse,
a place of unprecedented uncertainty, with apparently no inside and no outside, no above and no below, no here and no there, no mine and no thine, no good and no bad. It is the world of water, where all life floats in suspension; where the realm of the sympathetic nervous system, the soul of everything living, begins; where I am indivisibly this and that; where I experience the other in myself and the other-than-myself experiences me.
According to Jung, the unconscious (both personal and collective) is therefore synonymous with ego loss, in that the unconscious eliminates boundaries between the 'I' and the rest of the world. He states that the creative person is somehow able to connect unconscious knowledge with conscious ideas, which often results in a creative product or action. Creative intuition is a communication between the conscious mind and the collective unconscious, which suggests possibilities inherent in a subject or situation.This recalls Heidegger's concept of Being, which is an openness to the world through one's state of mind. It involves self-abandonment – an emptiness of mind, not seeking, but listening, waiting and reflecting. In his essay, 'The Origin of the Work of Art', Heidegger writes that in this state of mind 'the artist remains inconsequential as compared with the work, almost like a passageway that destroys itself in the creative process for the work to emerge'. By adopting a passive and receptive state of mind, ordinary, habitual ways of thinking are annihilated, and the artists may be open to the poetic moment. In another essay 'The thinker as poet', he claims: 'We never come to thoughts. They come to us. That is the proper hour of discourse.' Heidegger describes the artist as 'one who truly knows what is', in other words, a person deeply aware of every passing moment of Being and completely open to its possibilities. A Buddhist concept related to this is sunyata, which can be described as the living void, the passing concreteness of experience, which is continually opening to us. It is understood as non-anthropocentric in that, in this void, the individual self loses its separateness and merges with reality beyond itself.
Theresa Hardman, 'Understanding Creative Intuition' is available for download here:
Jul 03, 2017
In a process characterized by continuous destabilizing shift, I change creative approaches, painting methods, materials, and compositions. By using a non-linear, non-complete structure, I aim to ‘ weaken’ my own approach to painting to a point where unexpected results would emerge and result in the transformation, and a new understanding of my own art and call in to question the norm of art production in general. This method is inspired by Gianni Vattimo’ s theory of ‘ weak thought’ —pensiero debole— which he developed in the late 1980s.‘ Weak thought’ is a positive nihilist understanding of the post-modern condition that accepts the erosion and destruction of the traditional metaphysical and rational foundations of modernism as something positive. This will gradually lead to an ethical, social, and political transformation. In my work, I am inspired by pensiero debole to allow myself to dismantle, shift, transgress, and corrupt boundaries adopted through the years in my practice as painter, designer, and architect. For every new art project, I start with a new premise.