THE ROSES by Dorothea Lasky

THE ROSES

DOROTHEA LASKY

For so long I have feared that the world of contemporary art is spiritually vapid. Maybe I’ve thought this because of the modes of production, the ways in which art must be customized and commodifed today, makes it packaged in such a way that it cannot hold the spirit. I’m always searching for those pieces of art — past, present, or future –– that can.

Hilma af Klint painted what art historians have called the frst abstract art. Tey say she painted from her gut or her soul — a type of automatic painting, and did not engage in pre- or post- thought. She neither planned out what she was about to do, nor did she necessarily craft or wring her ideas out through hours of meddling. She made forms that spoke to her from spirits that were so presently inside her that they may have as well been elsewhere, and from a voice not her own, the voice that calls to us when we are born.

Klint was a follower of Spiritism, which like so many other religions, asserts that a spirit and a body work in tandem throughout a life. Spiritists also believed in something called a perispirit, a sort of binding principle between the spirit and body — a third thing. Tis thing was thought to be a type of solidity, like smoke, as if the form of the ghost was the holy ectoplasm. As if the thing we see as the mirage were real. Because it is.

People I have loved have died. All of us have loved people who have died. We search for their whereabouts after they are gone and when we sense them right beside us, what do we feel? I am still living so I don’t completely know the answer. But I do know that when I look at Hilma af Klint’s paintings I am somehow inside the liminal, where death was always the state of what things were.

It isn’t sad like some might understand it to be. It’s efortlessly cerebral, the feeling mind. When I am completely submerged in Klint’s paintings, it is that beach sensation between land and ocean, if land were life and ocean were death. Like when you are on that edge between the two, you ask: Should I jump in, should I go back to my yellow towel, should I try to jump up into the sky and edge out either answer? It’s probably not that easy to make a decision like that. Klint’s paintings are the form of that question — Should I? When the question should be — Can I? Or, must I? When the question is always, do they call for me in the ocean? Oh, but they always do. You don’t need to ask that. We artists call for them, too.

Klint’s forms always say, it’s neither beach nor ocean that matters, it’s the solid air that was always holding you steady, a lattice of air to climb when the moment is right, when the moment means for you to. Klint’s forms say that jelly air has colors and shapes and they interact in the eternal moment and her paintings say, look, I took a picture of that moment. And when we look at them ourselves, in the museum or the history book, we say, thank you, dear painter, you showed us, yet again: we are real.

RACHEL ROSKE, EYE SHADOW, 2017, SILVERPOINT ON CANVAS,16 X 21 INCHES.