loveMELT Newsletter #020: Late Bloomer
I’ve never been interested in painting still lifes. My mind reverts to the 1600s and I find them dated, decorative, out of touch and for the well-mannered, not for me. But I’m a sucker for a Matisse still-life. This is absolutely hypocritical because Matisse lived through an age of unprecedented technological growth, witnessed two world wars, the Holocaust, and the dropping of the atomic bomb. His paintings reference none of this. In fact, he’s been quoted saying he wanted his art to have the same effect as a comfortable armchair on a tired businessman.
As a tired big kid stuck in a businesswoman’s suit, I find Matisse’s still lifes incredibly vibrant, playful, and subtly absurd. The objects painted are so simple, it’s almost as if not much attention is paid to individual differences. One might say they look a bit cookie-cutter, which is actually on the nose because Matisse’s last major oil painting is one of my favorites, ‘Interior with an Egyptian Curtain’. Sometime after the painting, he would be confined to a wheelchair and no longer be able to paint. To get around this, he would draw with color by cutting sheets of paper he would then collage. He had started cutting out paper during the same time of this piece.
Knowing ‘Interior with an Egyptian Curtain is his last major oil painting, the painting feels edged with sadness. Maybe that’s why he painted the interior walls black, to contrast the feeling of outside to the feeling of inside as his body can no longer perform as it used to. I looked this up to see. It’s not so. Think about staring out of a window on a very bright, sunny day. When you turn to look back in, you almost see nothing, it’s very dark until your eyes adjust. He used that phenomenon to darken the walls and increase the intensity of color of the objects.
While this piece, painted in 1948, isn’t meant to symbolize his current state of being, considering the piece as a future person, in 2023, I do consider the times he grew up in, where his brain sought to go and take others, and empathize with this painting being his last due bodily confinement. It's like the painting becomes a happy-mask. The larger, surrounding undertones amidst Matisse and his times, culminate into daydreaming, into painting a happier picture for himself, into surrounding himself in his studio with things that made him happy, to feel comfort. Maybe I’m projecting on Matisse a bit but I connect to this because those thoughts actually feel real to me and often most like the reality I currently live in.
In my studio, also known as my apartment, I find myself in a similarly tumultuous world time, engulfed in major technological advancements whose effects are to be known, alive amidst a pandemic, watching geographical catastrophes around the world due to global warming, listening to news about geopolitical wars, and dejectedly laughing when I hear the latest American politics.
I sit and work imaginatively in my space, near the plants on my window sill, and seek easier, brighter days for myself and others. Matisse kept the ‘ugly’ from rearing its head in his paintings. I do not. It is inescapable to me. I’ve started a new painting that will depict an interior with a window, just like a Matisse still life, but with text-flowers, reading “Late Bloomer”, playfully popping out of the vase.
As a teenager, I was deemed a late bloomer to womanhood. Moving away from American southern suburbia to learn about life for myself as an adult, I’ve deemed myself a late bloomer in my understanding of the world, in my artistic career, and in my love-life. The late-blooming flowers acknowledge the fact I’m late to the party for most things which has affected my life’s trajectory, but also leave me wondering if it matters because humans might be too late to the parties they should have RSVP’d centuries ago. As Matisse was no longer able to paint shortly after ‘Interior with an Egyptian curtain’, I ask if human creativity might shortly be confined by momentous circumstances we’ve lost understanding of.
PS-
I wrote a poem to go with this piece, 'Late Bloomer', that I’ll share with you soon.
And to help pull my mind out of thinking of still lifes as only from the 1600s, I did some digging to re-inform myself. I found some great stuff and several contemporary artists doing interesting things with it. I’ll share my findings when I share my poem.
Talk Soon,
Sadie