i could see silences...

"mallarme' finally showed me how the words were arranged on the page. it seemed to me that i was looking at the form and pattern of a thought, placed for the first time in finite space. here space itself truly spoke, dreamed, and gave birth to temporal forms. expectancy, doubt, concentration, all were visible things. with my own eye, i could see silences that had assumed shapes. inappreciable instants became clearly visible; the fraction of a second during which an idea flashes into being and dies away; atoms of time that serve as the germs of infinite consequences lasting through psychological centuries - at last these appeared as beings, each surrounded by palpable emptiness...

we have a record in his own hand of what he planned to do; he was trying to employ thought nakedly and fix its pattern. he dreamed of a mental instrument designed to express the things of the intellect and the abstract imagination."

paul vale'ry, in reference to stephen mallarme's un coup de de's, in the book stripped bare, 1973.(image, 1904 self portrait by e. munch)

three landscapes...

a nice hotel in bergen norway with good internet connection and unable to sleep tonight... so a post of images from the national gallery of art in oslo ... the top by edvard munch, the middle by august strindberg, and the bottom by peder balke. all three were mind bending, mystical, and sublime....

the munch has this wonderful test tube shape of the moon reflected in the sea that he used in a lot of works. i also visited the munch museum, and it really seems that if you want to get a sense of how lonely it is at times to be an artist munch's work really reveals so much of this. the paintings are tinged with psychedelic colors, and seem so much about an interior life. in many of the works, the outside of things is almost dead cold and dark, while the inside is living breathing luminous mystical activity...

the stringberg painting was an unbelievable surprise. i've obsessed over his paintings for years and never was able to see one in person until i turned the corner in the museum and there was the sea marn, which has always been one of my absolute favorites. a perfect compliment to munch's interior work; strindberg painted a bit like a mainiac and the interior frenetic activity of munch is all over the surface of strindberg's seascapes - the large cliff/rock is a ton of built up slapped on paint. it's completely haunting to see these dense grays and blacks created with a kind of manic energy. having recently visited a small island at the westernmost tip of norway, it seems to be related to the incredible force of the wind, which was, in reality, completely insane.

peder balke was an artist i'd never heard of and two of his works were up in the museum, including the bottom image, which was absolutely stunning. the entire mountain area in the sky was simply loose paint applied with a pallet knife and then rubbed over with a patina. you can feel the shift of his wrist in it, and much of the imagery at the bottom is also done with what appear to be quick scrapes of paint. amongst his contemporaries, the technique and results are completely amazing and forward thinking. and, again, these landscapes feel somewhat more about the inside of things (interior movement, history, being alive....)

it was a really wonderful experience to start my trip experiencing the landscape through these paintings, and then going out into the reality of it, seeing traces of all of these in many of the places i visited...