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there is a certain melancholic feeling to winter scenes in paintings and photographs due to nature's power in covering the landscape with the vast whiteness, a comforting blanket. snow is one of those things that have the power of great contrasts, as with most forces in nature, it is beautiful and clean but it can also bite into your bones and cause death and injury (gentle, falling snow, and harsh blizzards, obstructing your vision: in both the blanketing but also the snowstorm- though there is visibility in the tracks they reveal on its surface) I also feel like winter is one of the most definite seasons, it makes its presence known, you say to yourself, winter is coming, this is going to be a hard winter, remember to wrap up and don't get sick... (of course, not every place in the world experiences harsh winters with snow, but as the winter season approaches, almost certainly the mood drops to a naturally more depressing hue because of the cold)
why do we associate the cold with the sad and melancholic? the freeze = numb? lack of emotion/warmth? though, when I was looking through at these paintings like with Courbet and Homer, a lot more warm tones are used than I expected. I started to notice how the change in temperature really shifts the mood of the whole landscape. I have not really dived deeper into this kind of thing before, so it is really exciting. I really like that contrast between the warm tone and the obvious cold in the scene, I feel it almost emphasises the presence of the warmth in the people, animals, not just in the living/breathing/bodily presence of them but, perhaps the emotions such as the companionship between the figures or, the state of mind the animal is in, on alert or, fear, I feel I can feel the heat giving off from their bodies. or even suggest the presence of the sunlight as well, of course, the sun can still shine in winter, reflecting harshly off the snow, the contrast here in nature is significant, slowly melting, in an invisible speed...
Cool, Warm, and 'cotton-candy' tones - Peter Doig's Ski Jacket
the winter scenes depicted in cool tones which I picture in my mind when I think of winter have a very lonely, depressing, lost, empty, stagnant atmosphere, literally frozen in time. that's the thing about paintings and photographs, they are a moment in time... and how real they are is different for each artist and viewer, again relating to the idea of travel, the artist is travelling back in time in that memory or, travelling into the photograph they'd taken, and the viewer, to, as if given a lens to attempt to understand that moment of time they saw, whether it was in their mind or in real life, can be transported through these mediums. I feel this especially in Doig's iconic paintings, these really just last in your mind, perhaps not the details but the atmosphere and feeling you get as you look at the paintings. I remember first seeing his work at Tate modern, it was the Ski Jacket one, it was huge, and as he said, large canvases are immersive and you get pulled in very easily. (What Doig says in the catalogue about his time occupied in the studio applies also to what viewers encounter: “Painting is about working your way across the surface, getting lost in it. The large size of the paintings is about the idea of getting absorbed in them, so you physically get lost.” ) I really like how doig gets his imagery from memories, and photographs (of skiers on a Japanese mountain for this painting). he also talks about the unusual colours used:
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| Ski Jacket, 1994 |
this, to me, pulls a lot of interesting points...
-the contrast between the feeling warm, all bundled up in our human, protective gear, in the 'real', 'un-human' nature (human-nature contrast) that is ice-cold, causing sweat and fogging up your glasses, being first time skiers and awkwardly fumbling about (he mentions this awkwardness as something he wanted to show as well)
-the act of putting on different coloured goggles, and the lens/perspective/taking in colours of 'nature', this external 'lens' that is supposed to protect our eyes, manipulates the 'real' colours instead, sacrificing one for the other. which one is more important, the protection of our eyes or seeing everything in its 'true' form...
but also the multitude of lenses apparent here.. the lens of the camera that took the original photograph doig saw, and the lens in which doig saw this photograph (focussing on the awkwardness of the first-time skiers, perhaps), and the lens in which we, the viewer is looking at this painting now, which is through the brushstrokes on this surface, and each of our cultural context and common knowledge of each concept (e.g. 'snow' 'skiing' 'painting')
-appearing seemingly 'psychedelic' (in terms of psychedelic drugs, they come form nature as well..) (the colours here are usually overwhelmingly contrasted and bright, which I feel like is a sort of colour palette I've used before, when my indecisiveness to colours led to me using too many colours, especially in 'what doesn't kill you', making it appear, as somebody told me, 'like a fever dream', or a hallucination, which could also be because I used a lot of local colour) (I also always think of that one scene in dumbo with the psychedelic imagery of elephants dancing around after they got supposedly drunk. a dark concept in a 'children' film. but then again that film was really traumatic, as with many children's films. what does that say about society...)
-concept of 'rose-tinted' like the common phrase of 'rose-tinted/rose-coloured glasses' which, in recent pop culture, I will always remember the lyric in katy perry's song chained to the rhythm which I personally think is one of her best songs just because of how real it is to our humanness today, with lyrics like 'living our lives through a lens' 'trapped in our white pocket fence' 'so comfortable, we're living in a bubble/ we cannot see the trouble' 'up there in utopia, where nothing will ever be enough' 'your rose-coloured glasses on, and party on' 'dance, dance, dance to the distortion' 'we think we're free' 'we're all chained to the rhythm, to the rhythm, to the rhythm' ... I can really picture humanity just dancing and partying on when the world around them is crashing down... which seems like it is the case with all these global issues that seem so impossible to solve that everyone is 'sweeping it under the mat', and I'm guilty of it as well. I suppose this also relates to the painting I'm planning now, the contrast of the people in the room and the natural disaster happening outside.
I also looked more into the phrase and it lead me to the psychological term 'rosy retrospection' from wikipedia, not reliable but had a lot of intriguing points, like (in bold):
Although rosy retrospection is a cognitive bias, (??) and distorts a person's view of reality to some extent, some people theorize that it may in part serve a useful purpose in increasing self-esteem and a person's overall sense of well-being.
Simplifications and exaggerations of memories (such as occurs in rosy retrospection) may also make it easier for people's brains to store long-term memories, as removing details may reduce the burden of those memories on the brain and make the brain require fewer neural connections to form and engrain memories.[citation needed] Mnemonics, psychological chunking, and subconscious distortions of memories may in part serve a similar purpose: memory compression by way of simplification. Data compression in computers works on similar principles: compression algorithms tend to either (1) remove unnecessary details from data or (2) reframe the details in a simpler way from which the data can subsequently be reconstructed as needed, or (3) both. Much the same can be said of human memories and the human brain's own process of memorization.
In English, the idiom "rose-colored glasses" or "rose-tinted glasses" is also sometimes used to refer to the phenomenon of rosy retrospection. Usually this idiom occurs as some variation of the phrase "seeing things through rose-tinted glasses" or some other roughly similar phrasing.
Rosy retrospection is also related to the concept of declinism. (declinism is the belief that a society or institution is tending towards decline. Particularly, it is the predisposition, possibly due to cognitive bias, such as rosy retrospection, to view the past more favourably and future negatively)
all these close relations to nostalgia seems very intertwined to doig's work... what I didn't think about was -the idea of this phrase describing the modifying of memories, by compression, to fit in our long term memory (can you trust any of your memories? does the truth matter if it is in an 'ideal' form?) - its comparison to computer data (again, the contrast between the human and the machine) -being useful in increasing self-esteem or well-being, protection? being too optimistic? you can't ever win. being too positive could be bad as well -and the idea about declinism, viewing the past more positively than the present or future...you really see the shape of the graph/decline curve downwards here...
-and finally, he compared everything to cotton candy, which invokes a dreamy/dream-like sequence, like you are floating in the sky without a care in the world, (like the rose-coloured glasses), but to me this also seems to have a kitschy reference?? you often see desserts like ice cream depicted in this genre, the sickly-sweet and the kawaii cuteness attached to it in Japanese culture, especially in the food models at every restaurant... this 'cotton candy' reference to colours also reminds me to the dreamy colours in some of mark ryden's work, (he also does a lot of work on nature, and blood/meat as well..will inspect further) ***images, diorama, and book, and those paintings with pink and meat,
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| Memory Lane (diorama automaton, 2013) |
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| Rosie's Tea Party, 2005 |
https://www.markryden.com/press/archive/high-fructose-july-2006/index.html (interview, also mentioning how Rosie, his daughter, posed for his painting for the first time in this painting) (flashback to when I painted my sister, how bringing familiar faces to yourself changes the piece)
in relation to this 'cute-creepy' style, (which I don't think gets enough credit, or is disregarded as something that might be less sophisticated/not as painterly just because it is 'cute')
I feel it usually resonates with younger women (like me) because we like both the aesthetic of the cute and the contrast of the dark. It is that conflict, that I was so drawn to initially, (though after high school I realised that this 'contrast' I was investigating seems a bit too explicit, it is too simple of a contradiction that it is not as complex as I want it to be. I also don't want to be labelled as, the girl who paints those pink bloody things. which I think I was known for in high school.. my teacher also said I am the most likely to become a psychopath he's known, because I was drawn to gore and, specifically, when asked to make a book of beauty, I made a book about that exactly, referencing human flesh and blood and violence and hellish imagery, but anyway, at the graduating exhibition, where I was exploring the theme of 'conflicts/conrtasts' of course, I was looking at that in more implicit ways...) so the cute, rosy colours and images sort of is also like the lens of the rose-coloured glasses, on these artworks, like a horrific, wonderful dream... like everything is an illusion, but sprinkled with reality... and you don't know which is which... you just want to wake up, but also stay here and smell the flowers and taste the blood forever. anyway, I'm making another post about this in music, as well as talking about kitschy/random concepts in music videos/performance in korean and japanese pop music (which I am obviously a fan of).
Personal Feeling about Snow
Cabin in the Woods
Symbolism of Snow (and blood in snow)
-blood in milk like in confessions
-conceal
-again popularised by animations like frozen, again thinking about how we take in nature.
The Fox in the Snow and Culture
https://philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/102943.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fox_Hunt_(painting)
*personal experience with snow
*cabin in the woods photo - tangled up in memories of that trip / dreams about the idea of cabin in the woods
*conversation with a friend about snow and blood (a lot of these paintings are of hunters) (blanketing of violence, again the power dynamic of man and nature) (especially the fox, which is an animal that I somehow feel very attached to, I don't know why, perhaps simply bc they are beautiful, perhaps they are understood in today's context as pests in London, perhaps of their peculiarity and 'character' of being sly/cunning in literature/film and Japanese culture like the nine-tail fox or the kitsune...)
Peter doig
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https://calsfieldnotes.wordpress.com/tag/peter-doig/ this post details their visit to see the painting in person..
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| Blotter |
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| (etching) |
from the post:
On the relation between the absurd and the serious in his works he refers to ‘Blotter’. “This guy standing and looking at his feet, I mean is this a valid subject for a painting?When i was working on this image I looked at Courbet’s ‘Hunters in the Snow’ (below). The thing I love about the hunters is their ordinariness, the way they’re wearing modern clothing. It relies quite directly on things like the silhouettes of the figures against the white of the snow.”
‘Blotter’ is actually one of the few paintings I have staged. When I was in Canada for Christmas 1993, I staged this composition with the idea of making a painting with a realistic image of reflection.It’s a portrait of my brother, at the time he must have been around 28 years old.”
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Hunters in the Snow or The Poachers (oil on canvas) by Gustave Courbet (1819-77)  |
