For Your Consideration
‘I salute you, for you have stumbled upon a floating island of ideas that may or may not contain treasures equal to those described in sumptuous Valois inventories. Do not hesitate to map the amenities offered by this garden of delights, following the trail left by the golden gift of your attention. Indulge, criticise, reminisce. And if the words of this place put a taste of ambrosia on your lips, join in for a shared feast in an art-lover’s mind-palace’.
That, at least, is what my quill scrawled on the draft homepage of a would-be blog: a patchwork of fashionable, pseudo-intellectual clickbait, knitted as tightly as a grandmother’s sweater. The idea behind some sort of creation has been hovering about my head like an eerie fairy – dainty, pretty, hard to catch, and impossible to catalogue. Half a year of mulling it over proved to be of little help, so the final item on my creative-work list, doing, has at last taken its turn. And thus, here I am, making the acquaintance of your eye as it feasts on these sentences. Bon appétit: voilà your amuse-bouche, served by a somewhat Sartrian waiter. One day I will slap myself on the wrists for sprinkling in such silly references, but not today. Today this author is mixing up orders and toppling tables at the café philo that the endeavour of blogging is.
With a gentle squint and subtly arched brow, a young lady from (you’ll never guess it) Portrait of a Young Girl by Petrus Christus occupies the place of the central picture — a pleasant visual hook it is to have her here. The quirkiness of the font is proportional to the writer’s spiritual conviction to oppose anything Helvetica-like. Knowing how to choose a good font is rather like being able to pick the correctly shaped cutlery; in short, it requires taste, and preferably a good one (going on a literary rant about the narrow selection of fonts on social media is surely in my plans). ‘Als ich can’, Jan van Eyck’s clever inscription from the frame of one quite well-known portrait of an elegantly garbed man, is corrupted here to reflect my humble aspiration to deliver words to the best of my ability.
Art history as a discipline is full of old souls with glasses; one’s right eye is always worse than the left. It is all about the poetry of the image, about looking so closely that a part of your mind converses with the object. It is about indulgence… Oh, how much of it! But also struggle – dead ends where life springs if you dive deep enough (but sometimes not); not being able to translate correctly what the object is saying, and hence frustration; searching for the right word to make it a fitting companion for the image. So you go to the gallery of words and search relentlessly until that shiny sense becomes graspable. The sensitivity it takes. The stamina it demands. The pleasure it brings when you hear, or read, or write just what envelops the object, as petals encircle a seed.
This account, thus, is meant to serve as a chronicle of the enduring amor fati that I have fallen headfirst into with writing about art, whatever form it takes.
Welcome to ‘the art-lover’s mind-palace’ or whatnot.
