At various stages of my painting’s evolution, different genres have suggested themselves- landscape, figurative, abstract, floral- and approaching resolution the painting, rather than having become one or the other, remains “all of the above.”
The other day on Facebook I came upon an excerpt of a TS Eliot poem and as I read, I felt it to be a description of the themes that are on my mind as I attend to my new work, particularly of this painting. It is the poem Burnt Norton, one of the suite “The Four Quartets.”
Here are a few excerpts:
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
………………………………………………..
The trilling wire in the blood
Sings below inveterate scars
Appeasing long forgotten wars.
…………………………………………………
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
………………………………………………….
And the old made explicit, understood
In the completion of its partial ecstasy,
The resolution of its partial horror.
Yet the enchainment of past and future
Woven in the weakness of the changing body,
Protects mankind from heaven and damnation
Which flesh cannot endure.
The whole poem can be read here.
Cornelia van Voorst 