What happened today--a funny incident

A little commentary on Northern Rennassaince art which I wrote
I've always been interested in the role of the artist's personal life in Northern Renaissance art. It all seems so cool--cold like the weather up north. There is often a great sense of calm as if a great quietness has fallen over all...I'm thinking van der Goes and van Eyck here... There's less passion than the Italian masters, and the style very fine so it's all rather impersonal to me although I feel that van der Goes's people's faces have been distorted by some deep anxiety or stress from inside them, like a kind of pressure rending the mind, or maybe that's just in context of his life (went mad, attempted suicide before finally dying).

For example there's the painting The Lamentation of Christ in which the woman in white in the corner of the far left seems to be grieving alone rather than with the rest, the painting is eerie in it's emotional intensity and I also wonder if van der Goes was able to intuit the intensity and remoteness of this grief and contrast it to the frenzied movement of the figures and their garment's billowing because he had ever felt this in himself.

The Death of the Virgin is even more extreme in this way. Each of the assembled characters are showing individual grief, all different yet with the same level of pain. Some of them look terribly abstracted while others lean in closer to the Virgin's bedside. The Virgin herself is disturbing in her pallor and the look of her, passing from life to death and I think that van der Goes tried to capture the mystery of the transmigration of the soul, her fingers are not quite clasp and her eyes are almost closing.

Death enters the picture as the radiant apparition of Christ and the angels and they are dressed in blue and red like Mary and the mourning characters, so perhaps the artist was establishing a link between life and death, the human and the divine. I think it might be an occurrence in the subconscious of the dying, of heaven opening up and the Son there to recieve them, invisible to those who are still definitely alive. So this could be the juxtaposition of the soul and the world, the intangible divine Truth and the reality that surrounds us in our lives.

The painting acquires an air of unreality from the brightness of the colours so that it appears as if the whole canvas/room were suffused with light.

I feel that the degree of personal feeling in the work of van der Goes is so deep that it is all very poignant.

Feel free to comment or correct me if I'm wrong. It's purely commentary.


pictures here http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/bio/g/goes/biograph.html



It's the 4th of February today. I'm in ACJC if you don't know yet.

Something very interesting happened, it's more a narrative than anything and more situational than anything but I'll try to write down the proper series of events. Heck, it was a little ray of sunshine in an almost monochromatically grey day...art lessons! maths lecture! Chinese! Headache! No wonder I haven't been my usual self.

I went for lunch at the Japanese "restaurant" (not sure if the term is applicable here) at school. The food wasn't too good and I think that might have caused my second headache later on in the afternoon (first one was during literature and Chinese--last lesson of the day). I ordered tori katsu-don and all I got was some rice with soya sauce, raw shredded lettuce and bits of fried chicken...can't take that kind of food.

Now...what made up for everything that otherwise went totally wrong--a murky fish tank in the far corner. The background of it, for some queer reason, was blue...bright blue...it's that kind of lousy aquarium that's a filthy glass box of water and dead, dying fish. In it was a large arrowana fish, it's shape was bent as it's body had set in rigor mortis (for it had been dead some time already I expect). There must have been a pump in the tank for the ghastly shape went blowing back and forth in strange stiff somersaults so that it's blackened eye kept coming back, again and again to face the watcher. There were two other fish lying sideways at the bottom, these were flat, silver and of unidentifiable specie. There was another half dead silver flat-shaped fish floating on the top corner and gazing at us too, swallow swallow gulp...

Then an old woman (the owner of the, hm... place) came out with a containber of fishfood and spooned some in as if she expected it to be of any use. The fish did not improve. Old woman stares at the fish and yells something into the back of her...place. A man's voice: It's dead!

A while later, a service staff dressed in shorts and T-shirt who looks suspiciously like a Philipino maid and a young man come out. They stand in front of the fish tank and have a mini-conference over what to do about the dead fish. Dead or not dead, what to do, you hold or I hold (note, this is purely conjecture). The maid stuck a net, a small red water scooper into the tank before realising that she'd have to grab the fish with her hands to remove it. Uck.

So the guy went back in and got a bucket. Maid stuck her hand in and held the arrowana for awhile then let it go again. After more conferring,k she grabbed it with both hands and put it into the bucket the man was holding.

Funny how it wasn't the other way round. Often it turns out that women have to do the gross jobs.

I took a picture and video of the dead fish. Will try to post them sometime.

Hmm. When I came home and told my mother she asked me if I prayed for it. Clean slipped my mind.