A friend just sent me an email containing a scan of her most recent black and white drawing. Her drawings and paintings often convey a still, contemplative mood, and this one made me cry unexpectedly.
Upon opening, I scanned it slowly (with my eyes!), appreciating her doting description of what I recognized as a monastery church in the Serbian countryside. The artist is a Serb displaced as a result of the Yugoslav civil war in the 1990s. The medieval church she depicted is atypical because of its rectangular entry (usually arched) and square tower at the crossing (usually cylindrical). The edifice lies majestic and isolated from its surroundings (protective wall, habitation and service buildings) on a plain of grass, its doorways and windows mysteriously dark. The image evokes the eeriness of Max Klinger’s The Theft, a print from his brilliant etching series The Glove, produced in 1878, which depicts a series of events that begin with the mundane incident of a ladies’ glove lost at a Berlin skating rink, which morphs into a talismanic object for the finder. The Theft illustrates a far more dramatic and anxious event than the monastery image (entitled simply The Bench): in the depths of darkness a pair of desperate arms reach frantically through the broken glass of two windowpanes in order to arrest a pterodactyl-like creature fleeing with the sacred glove.
In The Bench, times of day meet—as they can only in art—at the center of the tower, producing a surreal setting of a star-studded night sky arranged into collegial constellations on the left and a steep hill with a bright, cloudless sky on the right. A majestic old tree delimits the right edge of the image, its leafy branches reaching robustly toward the church tower, while its trunk becomes fainter, completely disappearing before it reaches the earth. Like a ship disappearing in a fog. In the tight corner formed by the hilltop and the tree stands a bench beside a sundial and on it, a lone short-haired figure—legs crossed, and jacket piled beside them—with head in three-quarter profile gazes out. To what, we do not know.
At the moment my eyes met that solitary figure they began to tear up. In the same way they do when particular memories arise or when I hear the opening bars of songs (don’t ever play for me Red River Valley!) associated with a profound emotional experience, like songs my father used to sing. While the vision of a monastery church beneath a starry sky and of a long figure seated on a hilltop bench beneath a cloudless sky are unremarkable, juxtaposing them transports the image to the realm of Surrealism, dream, memories, associations, the subconscious.
I suspect it’s a kind of generic self-portrait: my friend undoubtedly has been to this place (I think!) and the figure’s short hair reminds me of her. She’s recently experienced several momentous events that foster reflection, one of which is unspeakably and incomprehensibly tragic. That may have figured into my response. Nonetheless, the moment represented, I’ve experienced many times, as you may well have also. Sitting alone on a bench with no immediately pressing engagements, watching clouds, people walking dogs, soccer games, farmers plowing their fields. And listening: twittering birds, mooing cows, ringing churchbells, buzzing bees, humming traffic. Perhaps this image triggered my somatic associations of these experiences. Moments of contemplative solitude. Eyes open quasi-meditations. No particular experience arose in my memory – just that prickly feeling around my eyes and a tightening in my chest: the physical residues of memory (maybe I have too large a cache of memories for one to rise above the others?).
Finally, the poignancy of the tree at right with its robust foliage seeming to reach out toward the more delicate tree behind the building, whose sparsely beleafed branches seem to strain to meet its elder neighbor, although distance isn’t always easy to judge in two dimensions. Old Age and Youth. That’s undoubtedly what triggered the image in my mind of Auguste Rodin’s She Who Once Was the Helmet Maker’s Beautiful Wife, a sculpture that’s always haunted me and now especially so, since that’s how I’m beginning to feel, if not look. While the actual reason for my connection with this drawing may never surface (and it doesn’t need to, if there even is one), I am grateful that beauty, whether created by humans or nature, can evoke such profound emotion. Thank you, my friend!
