Art connects us to each other, even when we are necessarily separated. It provides windows into the human experience as lived by someone else, someone who perhaps is struggling with the same burden that we bear. Art can be therapeutic, consoling, inspiring and educating. The best art is not didactic but dialogic, requiring only that we look at it and see it.
For some of us, lockdown has been a form of imprisonment. One colleague recently mentioned that they had yearned for the horizon. The very limit of their gaze inhibited by the walls of home. In “Scylla”, Ithell Colquhoun presents a mythological mind-scape based on the female monster inhabiting a narrow channel of water and feeding on passing sailors. One can see the clear-blue waters of the Aegean, the modern yacht floating inert on the impossibly calm surface. Thoughts might then wander to ancient sailors, of countless generations who have lived and died along Hellenic coastlines, of other myths. Or perhaps the eye is drawn to the seaweed and thoughts to rock-pooling as a child. But one can also see Ithell’s legs in the bath and be reminded that even in lockdown imprisonment, there is no limit to the gaze of the imagination.
Vermeer painted "The Little Street" as a fragment of the larger world. Lockdown has fragmented the world as we knew it and our way in it. Yet life goes on. Washing needs to be done, children need entertaining (and home schooling), hoovering demands attention. The representation of actions in art are always more than a simple representation of this particular action, because it brings to mind other actions like this one.
With the lockdown streets quietened, and everyone retreated into their homes, Vermeer reminds us that life goes on. The necessities of family, of household upkeep, of life, remain. Our friends and extended families may have retreated from our view but behind the walls of every home, they continue to potter along.
How do we live in this new locked-down world? How do we cope within the confines of our prison cell homes? For me, this situation has afforded some time and mental space for thought. In the painting “Woman with a Pearl Necklace”, Vermeer catches her at just such a moment. She is lost in thought, her gaze fixed on the mirror and her own reflection. This brings to mind the countless hours of Zoom screen time. Am I the only one who spends most of the time gazing at my own image?
A large portion of this painting is the blank wall behind the woman. The walls of our own homes must surely loom large in our own lives at the moment. But they are not inescapable. Vermeer activates this large, inherently bland space with his composition. The wall becomes the space through which her thoughts and gaze oscillate, light reflecting between her face and the mirror, our gaze following it like a tennis umpire follows the ball. The wall is the canvass on which this occurs, the stage where this is played out, the court where the ball is served and returned, volleyed and smashed back and forth. Without the wall, without the space, this painting is not alive, it would be static and without energy. With it, we live in the moment, we see her gaze, we think her thoughts.
Confined spaces need not confine our thoughts and imagination. The walls of our homes could become the stage where they play out. They could be the court where ideas and dialogue are batted back and forth, the medium through which our lives (for now at least) move.
The Eric Ravilious wood of a figure swimming in a woodland pond carving speaks to me of a quiet communion with nature. The figure is not simply an observer of the trees and hills but has become fully immersed in the physical environment and the moment. What connection do we have to the natural world? Do we just stand and watch, observing impassively and removed? Has humankind foolishly become meta-natural? Perhaps Ravilious asks us to be immanent, creatures of nature, not above it.
This carving also reminds me of Millais’ painting of Ophelia. She tells us “We know what we are, but know not what we may be.” Perhaps there is hope.
I am a social drinker and therefore have not had a sip since before lockdown began. Hogarth presciently drew what the end of lockdown may look like for some of us.
