Of restraint.
When it comes to composition––a painting, a poem, a film––so much of the work is about discovering the essence of the thing. The rest is arbitrary. The art comes from learning what to eliminate. This takes time.
***
My interest in the art and life of Louise Bourgeois led me to the writings and interviews assembled in this book. The italicized phrase above is from one of her early letters.
Old woman, new art.
Past, present, future: body. It’s a reaching place, this blood house, this mother’s form––out, out, she paints balloon bodies bursting with anxieties of desire, washing together in tides of pink, crimson, vermillion. She paints the sound and the fury of the gaping mouth, wild eyes; body like a net, like a sac, flower petal breasts like octopus arms: reach.
The images shock. The nerve, to dare production beyond her reproductive years. With a nod to decorum, might she not try creeping around the flesh?
Given her advanced age, wasn’t she supposed to have floated into something ethereal by now? Suffusions of light, passive serenity, reflections on a lake? Flowers would be appropriate. Ripe fruit, perhaps.
With flamboyant irony, she rejects easy ripeness, preferring instead to quarrel with time, to paint within her bodies the unresolved contradictions of her still-becoming self.
I am about to find the past, she says. I feel it, she says. I own it forever.
Her mornings continue in this manner, her mourning still undone.
***
Inspired by Louise Bourgeois, whose life and works are of deep interest to me lately. This morning, I was reading Rosemary Betterton’s article, Louise Bourgeois, ageing, and maternal bodies, published in a 2009 issue of Feminist Review.
