Over the years I have also accumulated many books over here in Japan. I bring a few each year, as reading generally replaces television due to my own lack of understanding of the local language. As a part of my academic plan this semester I will be reading Joyce, who has eluded me thus far. Last year I read short stories of Kafka and Gogol, and when I arrived I quickly opened the books to passages that I underlined. I tend to use this kind of material to inform my work. When I was younger, I would paint characters from Crime and Punishment, I was into allegorical painting, and Russian literature. Now I use such things in a less literal way to inform my work. The first passage that I turned to was in a short tale called The Portrait.
"Here in the portrait before him there was something strange. This was no longer art. The eyes actually destroyed the harmony of the portrait. They were alive, human! It was as if they had been cut from a living man and inserted in the canvas. Here was none of that sublime feeling of enjoyment which imbued the spirit at the sight of an artist's endeavors, regardless of how terrible the subject he may have put on canvas. There was a painful, joyless sense of anxiety instead. 'What's wrong?' the artist had to ask himself. After all, this was only an imitation of something from life."
This is such a mouthful. So many assumptions about beauty, the sublime, portraiture, and art in general. Gogol spent most of his life traveling, and wrote books on painting and architecture. The amazing thing to me when I read it was that it was written in 1842. This was pre-abstraction for the most part. Concepts of ugliness as beauty had not yet crept into the aesthetic consciensness of the time.
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