MELANCOLY
MELANCOLY, such a nice word with a lot of music in it and still such a bad reputation as most of the time it comes together with genius and madness in our occidental world.
This word followed me for quite a while and to get rid of it I made a painting called “HOMEMADE MELANCOLY.”
This is a very small detail out of this painting:
A couple of months ago I didn’t even know that there existed such things as “Melancoly Objects” even if I used some of them in my paintings.
Melancoly, like some kind of smoke that covers all of your thoughts and sadness invites itself into your home.
Aristote and Hippocrate were first in describing Melancoly and its symptoms.” State of mind” and “body” are chasing after each other, you can’t get hold of it. Unreal and real at the same time Melancoly has been associated with many terms, psychology, anatomy, philosophy etc. and may be one of the reasons to have Melancoly objects made lies just in it’s nature that you cannot get hold of it’s spirit.
There’s even a museum of melancoly. Well, and as they have to put something into this museum some objects got their melancolyc bi-names.
From Arbrecht Dürer to Edvard Munch, from Domenico Fetti to Giorgio de Chirico you will find many examples of this kind of art, not forgetting the “Penseur” by Rodin with it’s typicall melancolyc gesture: hold one’s head in your hands pretending you’re thinking quite deeply about something. May be that’s why you find not very often melancolyc politicians.
Personally I like a lot what H.F. Amiel (1821-1881) the swiss philosopher, poet and critic wrote about this subject:
“Melancoly is at the bottom of everything, just as at the end of all rivers is the sea.
Can it be otherwise in a world where nothing lasts, where all that we have loved or shall love must die?
Is death, then, the secret of life? The gloom of an eternal morning enwraps, more or less closely, every serious and thoughtful soul, as night enwraps the universe.”
Well, he couldn’t hide his talent for poetry and in todays world we say “thanks for sharing.”
