Death, Art, and Maudie

Not the most attractive title for a blog, I know. But it succinctly captures the reality of my recent experiences, which might be of some more general interest or reflection.

I was called out from my peaceful slumbers early one morning on Saturna Island by the phone ringing at my bedside. It was a death in the family. Someone much too young and with a still young family.

I took the first ferry off island, and then onto a plane headed to the east coast.  A doleful trip. Those of you who know such loss and sorrow in your lives need no more details of the heavy, dull, yet churning emotions en route ... or of the communal experience a family funeral exacts.

Tired but needing to distract myself en route, I turned to the airline movie selection and chose Maudie. A biographical film about the Nova Scotia artist, Maude Dawley Lewis, and set in the 1930s, it is directed by Aisling Walsh and features fine performances by Sally Hawkins and Ethan Hawke. 

link to global news commentary

 Overtly crippled by arthritis and disparaged by family and small-town judgements, Maud lives and works as house-cleaner for a poor, inarticulate, and rough fish peddler, Everett, in a house that seems barely more than a shack. Hardly the scenario for art or romance or some sort of success. And yet it is ... of a different sort.

The improbable happens. Maud is affirmed in love and in art, the latter being celebrated from locations as unlikely as Nixon's White House. It is no fable, yet the story has a fable's simply constructed trials, wonder, and moral outlook. Where better to find the truth of what one seeks or hopes for?

I cried as I watched it, stuck in the middle seat of a plane full of people, my eyes spilled with rolling tears. I was too tired, too drawn out of my life, to care much about my public appearance at the moment. In any case, these were not sentimental tears, but ones that seemed just: for the harsh realities of life. In this art-as-life movie, they were for a woman so bent yet strong, so afflicted yet affirming, so simple, direct, persistent, and brave in her art and in her life. Her circumstances were harsh, her health impaired by multiple factors, and her resources so substantially and financially constrained. Yet she endured and enriched, without triumph but with affirmation.

And, as with empathy, in general, the feelings evoked in the movie expanded to my immediate world.  A world so different than Maud's, so jam-packed with greed, excess, deliberate hypocrisy and self-serving righteous attitudes, where the political and personal get so regularly demeaned that they become TV fodder displayed as info-tainment. Where art is so commodified and artists so competitive that one questions where the "spirit" in  inspiration went. 

I sometimes despair of such a world, yet cherish the moments of what I'll call "Maud's world" for their simple pleasure and appreciation of the richness of life when it is lived and loved for its own sake and on its own terms. Hers seems a world that, when death comes knocking, isn't met with an "Is that all there is?" summary but with "I loved and was loved."

Maud  Lewis outside her home, see global news link

"Can you teach me to paint?", a sophisticated woman asks. Maud smiles that incandescent smile of hers, and quickly dismisses the woman's request, chuckling a bit with her gaze turned upward. "Owh, you can't teach that," she simply says.

Perhaps you can't. That kind of art stems from the untutored and very personally experienced appreciation of life. Something so simple, so profound, it cannot be taught.  

More Creative Life News

You can read and see more about creative life, travels, tips and creative adventures by this itinerant artist at Creative Life News at https://www.janetstrayer.com

Regards, Janet 

Dreams and Loving Vincent a

This is a love letter. I love Loving Vincent.

Loving Vincent is the world’s first fully oil painted feature film. It is a masterwork,  A gorgeous and gripping ensemble of painted visual art cinematically woven together. Not cartoony, not animé, but its own uniquely lush and painterly rendition of cinematic action. It's emotionally gripping, even without the plotline, which adds a touch of detective drama and mystery to the circumstances of Vincent's death. 

It took five years to finish production of this film. No wonder, after you see it. It's a triumph of love and technique. Written and directed by Dorota Kobiela & Hugh Welchman, produced by Poland’s BreakThru Films & UK’s Trademark Films, it was funded by the Polish Film Institute. Kudos and appreciation to them for getting this huge ball of creative effort rolling. It's a stellar tribute and triumph.

The film brings the paintings of Vincent van Gogh to life and tells his remarkable story, with a twist of mystery added to it. Every one of the 65,000 frames of the film is an oil-painting, hand-painted by 125 professional oil-painters. Then there are the storyboard illustrators, animators, cinematographers, and all the crew it takes to make a feature film.

Although Poland has a wonderful tradition in both cinematic and graphic art, there reportedly were not enough qualified artists in Poland, so that local talent was enhanced by artists from across the world coming to studios in Poland and Greece to be a part of the production. Even the actors used as models in the production look uncannily like actual characters in van Gogh's paintings!

from online trailer 

Watching this fascinating film, I was stunned by how quickly and thoroughly it drew me in. The black and white scenes (like flash-backs in a traditional movie) were intense, and at times so photographic I thought they were filming actors in black and white, rather than painting them. 

The colored scenes are just thrillingly gorgeous, with enough quirky stylistic changes to peak your interest as you travel through, not only van Gogh's paintings, but the whole painted storyline with its interesting, amusing, and dramatic personae and plot. You hardly think about how impossible a feat it is to be watching paintings move! 

I read subsequently that it took about 12 frames of individual oil paintings make up each second of Loving Vincent. That means a total of 65,000 paintings were used to produce the entire film. The batallion of painters spent up to 10 days painting just one second of film.

The result is breathtaking. If you haven't seen it, you must. And if you have seen it, you might like knowing something more about its production. Here's a brief BBC video interview by Sarah Wimperis that will give you a glimpse behind the scenes and into the process: click 

I'm glad that paintings contributing to this film are available for sale. I very much enjoyed looking at the online site showing them, along with 16 pages of photos and profiles of the artist/painters . How wonderful and torturous their labors must have been. I do wonder, though, to whom the paintings belong: the film producers, the painters, ...? What a feat to be part of a masterwork in our own time!

Dreams

While thinking over my experience of Loving Vincent, another film popped into mind. I recalled Dreams, a Japanese film by Akira Kurosawa that I'd seen in the 1990s. He is one of my favorite directors and a master visual stylist, creating beautifully epic tableaus.

A departure from his typical films, this one (the only one written by Kurosawa himself) is composed of dream vignettes. In particular, one episode, "Crows", deals with  van Gogh (played by another fine director, if less-than-convincing actor: Martin Scorcese).

The camera begins in gallery and moves across several of van Gogh's brilliant paintings while a solitary art student gazes at them. At one point, the student leans into a painting of a stone bridge with women working below it. Suddenly, he is inside the painting, which now has become the actual French countryside, and he is asks the women where he might find van Gogh.

from Crow segment of  Dreams (click to see online video lnk)

 The student journeys onward through many identifiable van Gogh scenes, some of them films of actual countryside, others (like Loving Vincent) close-ups and sets of van Gogh paintings. The student is always photographed as in a usual film (not painted) and he remains so, even as the scenes he walks through change from photography to painting. 

For me, a surprising pictorial moment occurs when the student, walking in the actual countryside, finds it  has turned into an ink painting:

online link

He subsequently traverses more richly painted backdrops. But, as an actual person, he's not fully integrated into the painted scene (in contrast to in Loving Vincent). He remains a foreign body inserted into it.  It's a different kind of statement, but seems to me a trail-blazing precursor.

For example, having the student blunder into the thickness of the paint (see below)makes this a palpably different experience for us watching than the more unified Loving Vincent. The dialectic between the actual and the imaginative creation is visible and mediated by Kurosawa's film itself. He conveys the tension of engaging in creation in a way that is both highly sophisticated and joyously naive.

Kurosawa is one of the great directors of the 20thC, who made stunningly beautiful movies -- even of mass carnage in combat. To learn that he was also a painter, often spending time painting pictures of every scene, makes the Crow segment of interwoven film and paint media even more meaningful. In his own words, "My purpose was not to paint well. I made free use of various materials that happened to be at hand." But the actual shots framed in his films clearly represent a realization of what he'd visualized (and often painted) beforehand.

A personal footnote to the magic of the moving picture:

As a very young child I was fascinated by a TV show that encouraged its tiny viewers to draw on the TV screen (plastic overlay sheet required). Whatever you drew would be incorporated into the plot in order to complete the scene for the show's cartoon characters. For example, you would draw a bridge to help a funny little guy get across a river, or crayon in a ladder for him to reach a window, or give him wings so  he could fly.

The idea was that if enough of us created the needed device, it appeared on screen and our little person would get out of a jam or get something desired. And of course, in the next few moments, a bridge, ladder, or wings appeared in the show, and the action was completed on screen.

For me, this show was enchantment itself. I was the creator of a small bit of magic that worked. I saw it happen on TV! This engagement in the process of art making reality has never left me, though I do wish I could now be as effective in changing the world as I was then.

More Creative Life News

You can read and see more about creative life, travels, tips and creative adventures by this itinerant artist at Creative Life News at https://www.janetstrayer.com

Regards, Janet