Kelley, Alice van Buren. To The Lighthouse: The Marriage of Life and Art. Twayne Publishers, Boston, 1987.
Among the many important influences in Virginia Woolf’s life, one of the primary ones was her interest in art and art theory. Woolf developed a close friendship with the prominent artist and art critic Roger Fry, who was also a fellow member of the Bloomsbury Group. In To The Lighthouse: The Marriage of Life and Art, Alice van Buren Kelley explores the friendship between Woolf and Fry, and the similarities between Fry and Lily Briscoe. Kelley examines the theory discussed by Fry in his work, Vision and Design, which was published five years before To The Lighthouse, and then connects the elements of his theory to Lily’s thoughts as she is painting. Lily’s art is generally acknowledged to be in the style of Post-Impressionism. Roger Fry was the person who, in 1910, bestowed the name Post-Impressionism upon the new art movement emerging from France. Fry believed that the most important elements of art were rhythm, balance, spatial arrangement, color, and the use of line in a significant way. Kelley notes Lily’s struggles to achieve these elements throughout To The Lighthouse; moving a tree to the middle, bringing a branch across one side, connecting the mass on the left with the mass on the right. Fry also discusses the importance of striving for purity of vision, regardless of what is currently seen as acceptable in the larger world. When Lily views the jacmanna as bright violet against a vividly white wall, she knows that her vision is different from that which is fashionable, but she stubbornly tells herself, “But this is what I see; this is what I see.” (TtL 23) Kelley suggests that Lily’s commitment to remain true to her vision is a manifestation of Woolf’s own creative dedication.
One of the hallmarks of Post-Impressionist art is a movement away from traditional representation, which can be seen in Lily’s choice of a purple triangle to represent Mrs. Ramsay reading to James. In Vision and Design, Fry also emphasizes the importance of rhythm and balance. Lily’s efforts to paint are stymied when she focuses on her mental activity. It is only when she stops thinking, and gives herself over to a rhythm, that her creativity flows: “Then, as if some juice necessary for the lubrication of her faculties were spontaneously squirted, she began precariously dipping among the blues and umbers, moving her brush hither and thither, but it was now heavier and went slower, as if it had fallen in with some rhythm which was dictated to her by what she saw, so that while her hand quivered with life, this rhythm was strong enough to bear her along with it on its current.” (TtL 163) At the very end of the book, Lily’s painting is completed when she draws a line down the center of the canvas, which is a direct expression of Fry’s philosophy on balance: “In a picture, unity is due to a balancing of the attractions of the eye about the central line of the picture.” (70) Woolf’s effort to transfer Fry’s theories to her writing is clear in the construction of To The Lighthouse. The stream-of-consciousness narrative style that Woolf uses is her way of moving beyond the traditional representation of the novel. Woolf’s narrative style maintains a beautiful rhythm and her composition of the characters achieves a composed balance. The form of her narrative, with its exquisite emphasis on each person’s thoughts, presents a new way to represent characters and their relation to one another. Kelley refers to the goal of Fry and Woolf as the achievement of a “purified reality”. Kelley’s book provides an understanding of Fry’s theories as they relate to Lily’s creative process, which in turn gives the reader a more authentic experience of Woolf’s narrative.
Showing posts with label art theory. Show all posts
Showing posts with label art theory. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
The Catharsis of Artistic Vision
Rowley, Alison. “Before Her Time? Lily Briscoe and painting now”. Unframed: Practices and Politics of Women's Contemporary Painting. Ed. Rosemary Betterton. I. B. Tauris, 2004. 17-39
Alison Rowley’s assessment of Lily Briscoe touches on both the influence of Roger Fry, and the introduction of psychoanalysis in Woolf’s life. Reflecting Roger Fry’s theories on art, Lily Briscoe’s Post-Impressionistic artistic vision differs from the “pale, elegant, semi-transparent” (TtL 22) style of the currently popular Impressionists, embodied by the fictional Mr. Paunceforte. Rowley tells us that “Woolf’s abiding fear about her experiments with narrative structure in her search to write the reality of character as a succession of ‘moments of being’ was that the novels would read as ‘pale’ and ‘semi-transparent’.” (22) Furthermore, Rowley sees a connection between Lily’s feelings about Mrs. Ramsay and her struggle to find the correct compositional balance for her painting. She notes this connection in the thoughts that Lily has when she is beginning to paint, and her thoughts when she is sitting at Mrs. Ramsay’s knee. At the moment Lily first touches paint to fresh canvas, Woolf has filled Lily’s head with an image of birth: “It was in that moment’s flight between the picture and her canvas that the demons set on her who often brought her to the verge of tears and made this passage from conception to work as dreadful as any down a dark passage for a child.” (TtL 22-23) When Lily is sitting at Mrs. Ramsay’s knee, she thinks that Mrs. Ramsay is “like the treasures in the tombs of kings, tablets bearing inscriptions, which if one could spell them out, would teach one everything.” (TtL 54) Rowley points out that both the womb and the tomb bring forth their contents only after a period or an act of upheaval occurs. The upheaval of birth is evident, and Rowley reminds us that a tomb is always sealed; in order to know the treasures contained within, a tomb must be forcibly broken open. With respect to Woolf’s mother, Rowley quotes a passage from Woolf’s essay, ‘A Sketch of the Past’: “It is perfectly true that she obsessed me, in spite of the fact that she died when I was thirteen, until I was forty-four. Then one day walking around Tavistock Square I made up, as I sometimes make up my books, To The Lighthouse; in a great, apparently involuntary, rush…Why then? I have no notion. But I wrote the book very quickly; and when it was written, I ceased to be obsessed by my mother.” (25) Rowley observes, “In general, Woolf’s narrative appears to parallel Freud’s observation that it is the absence of the maternal body that motivates the activity of symbolic substitution” (31) and she goes on to propose that the primary object of symbolic substitution is the blank canvas that so intimidates Lily when she begins to paint.
Throughout To The Lighthouse, Woolf has included clear indications of her own struggle to resolve her feelings about her mother and to apply Roger Fry’s art theory to her own writing. While other works address these topics separately, Rowley’s work weaves these elements together seamlessly. Rowley’s concept adds to the perspective gained from earlier works, providing a confirmation of sorts. Highlighting Lily’s difficulties with the spatial arrangement of the objects in her painting, Rowley notes, “This basic aesthetic operation is linked to psychic yields of unpleasure and pleasure related to experiences of the unavailability/absence of the mother.” (30) Based on the passages that Rowley includes from Woolf’s essay ‘A Sketch of The Past’, it appears that the process of writing To The Lighthouse was healing for Woolf. The creation of Lily Briscoe, a female artist who manifested challenges faced by Woolf in her own life, seems to have been cathartic for Woolf, giving her the ability to find some sort of resolution for her feelings towards her mother. At the end of the book, Lily Briscoe looks at her (almost) complete painting and is certain that the painting is destined to be hung in attics and eventually be destroyed. Undeterred, she lifts her brush and creates the famous line in the center of the canvas. With that, she is finished, and she thinks to herself, “I have had my vision.” (TtL 211) It is as if Woolf herself is defining To The Lighthouse as her seminal work; if the manuscript had lain in an attic, unseen and turning to dust, Woolf would still have attained her healing catharsis. This perspective shows us that Lily’s creative expression through paint, and by extension Woolf’s creative expression through words, exists largely for her own internal well-being, independent of the opinions of others.
Alison Rowley’s assessment of Lily Briscoe touches on both the influence of Roger Fry, and the introduction of psychoanalysis in Woolf’s life. Reflecting Roger Fry’s theories on art, Lily Briscoe’s Post-Impressionistic artistic vision differs from the “pale, elegant, semi-transparent” (TtL 22) style of the currently popular Impressionists, embodied by the fictional Mr. Paunceforte. Rowley tells us that “Woolf’s abiding fear about her experiments with narrative structure in her search to write the reality of character as a succession of ‘moments of being’ was that the novels would read as ‘pale’ and ‘semi-transparent’.” (22) Furthermore, Rowley sees a connection between Lily’s feelings about Mrs. Ramsay and her struggle to find the correct compositional balance for her painting. She notes this connection in the thoughts that Lily has when she is beginning to paint, and her thoughts when she is sitting at Mrs. Ramsay’s knee. At the moment Lily first touches paint to fresh canvas, Woolf has filled Lily’s head with an image of birth: “It was in that moment’s flight between the picture and her canvas that the demons set on her who often brought her to the verge of tears and made this passage from conception to work as dreadful as any down a dark passage for a child.” (TtL 22-23) When Lily is sitting at Mrs. Ramsay’s knee, she thinks that Mrs. Ramsay is “like the treasures in the tombs of kings, tablets bearing inscriptions, which if one could spell them out, would teach one everything.” (TtL 54) Rowley points out that both the womb and the tomb bring forth their contents only after a period or an act of upheaval occurs. The upheaval of birth is evident, and Rowley reminds us that a tomb is always sealed; in order to know the treasures contained within, a tomb must be forcibly broken open. With respect to Woolf’s mother, Rowley quotes a passage from Woolf’s essay, ‘A Sketch of the Past’: “It is perfectly true that she obsessed me, in spite of the fact that she died when I was thirteen, until I was forty-four. Then one day walking around Tavistock Square I made up, as I sometimes make up my books, To The Lighthouse; in a great, apparently involuntary, rush…Why then? I have no notion. But I wrote the book very quickly; and when it was written, I ceased to be obsessed by my mother.” (25) Rowley observes, “In general, Woolf’s narrative appears to parallel Freud’s observation that it is the absence of the maternal body that motivates the activity of symbolic substitution” (31) and she goes on to propose that the primary object of symbolic substitution is the blank canvas that so intimidates Lily when she begins to paint.
Throughout To The Lighthouse, Woolf has included clear indications of her own struggle to resolve her feelings about her mother and to apply Roger Fry’s art theory to her own writing. While other works address these topics separately, Rowley’s work weaves these elements together seamlessly. Rowley’s concept adds to the perspective gained from earlier works, providing a confirmation of sorts. Highlighting Lily’s difficulties with the spatial arrangement of the objects in her painting, Rowley notes, “This basic aesthetic operation is linked to psychic yields of unpleasure and pleasure related to experiences of the unavailability/absence of the mother.” (30) Based on the passages that Rowley includes from Woolf’s essay ‘A Sketch of The Past’, it appears that the process of writing To The Lighthouse was healing for Woolf. The creation of Lily Briscoe, a female artist who manifested challenges faced by Woolf in her own life, seems to have been cathartic for Woolf, giving her the ability to find some sort of resolution for her feelings towards her mother. At the end of the book, Lily Briscoe looks at her (almost) complete painting and is certain that the painting is destined to be hung in attics and eventually be destroyed. Undeterred, she lifts her brush and creates the famous line in the center of the canvas. With that, she is finished, and she thinks to herself, “I have had my vision.” (TtL 211) It is as if Woolf herself is defining To The Lighthouse as her seminal work; if the manuscript had lain in an attic, unseen and turning to dust, Woolf would still have attained her healing catharsis. This perspective shows us that Lily’s creative expression through paint, and by extension Woolf’s creative expression through words, exists largely for her own internal well-being, independent of the opinions of others.
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