Tonight I finished the painting that has been blocking my easel for the last eight months.
Eight months of despairing confusion. I knew in some inchoate way what the painting was about - trees shuddering in the wild winds of a winter night, evoking the night sea journey - yet there was no energy there for me, not even the pallid pull to completion, the bourgeois artist's petit mort. It felt like painting - more primal to my life than speech - had left me forever.
A few evenings ago, I got it, the image's connection with the opening stanza of Dante's Divine Comedy:
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
che la diritta via era smarrita.
Ahi quanto a dir qual era e cosa dura
esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte
che nel pensier rinova la paura!
Tant' e amara che poco e piu morte;
Midway on our life's journey, I found myself
In dark woods, the right road lost. To tell
About those woods is hard - so tangled and rough
And savage that thinking of it now, I feel
The old fear stirring: death is hardly more bitter.
(trans. Robert Pinsky)
These are the lines I've scrawled on the surface of the painting in thick arterial crimson. For I too in my fortieth year went through crisis; yet for me, death was not bitter, rather a beautiful being who occasionally comes into my arms to dance, lyrically. I feel like I've come out the other side, reborn; and hopefully, this painting completes that phase of birthing.
