Artis the Artist in Antwerpen

After weeks of spending hours wandering through European art museums, it would seem the works of Vermeer, Hals, Rembrandt, Rubens and Van Dyck are highly venerated. What a surprise....

While at the Gemeente Museum in Den Haag some time ago, I watched a long procession of Japanese tourists march with silent, albeit stoic determination to Jan Vermeer's View of Delft. Lead by a short woman who spoke loudly, they stared with confused wonder at the masterpiece. They crossed their arms, they blinked and nodded. I was curious as to what they were thinking. Maybe they were frustated at not being able to take a picture. Maybe they felt they had accomplished something by seeing the painting, i.e. they could cross it off the list.  Now they could be content.

I don't know where they went next. Probably not into the rest of the museum where more modern masterpieces by Kadinsky or Monet are being shown. Or maybe they did.

Presently the Gemeente, known more for its 20th century masterpieces is showingcasing the masters typically found in the Mauritshuis. Unfortunately the latter lovely, lavish building is being renovated so everything has been relocated. 

Walking about the Gemeente, the most highly perused works were those of the 16th and 17th century. I saw several Rembrandts (his Homer and Anatomy Lesson), several chaotic works by Jan Steen and of course Vermeer's famous Girl with a Pearl Earring (which will be making a stop in Japan sometime in the next little while).

As much as I love visiting these quiet, sacral spaces, I can't help but wondering about the artists and their lives. Rembrandt, I learned lived a fairly comfortable life, only later to be besotted with debt. Vermeer had many children and thankfully married into a wealthy family. 

As for the modern Van Gogh, his story has become legend, mythologized. People perhaps visit out of curiousity. They've been told he is genius but without the ear-cutting-off-incident, would he still draw the same audience? Is his life more integral to his art or a curious side piece, a tragic story we are darkly amused with? 

When I see the crowds lining up in front of his museum, I can't help but wonder if they would be the same kind of people who would deny him in his own time. (To be honest, I wonder the same about practicing Christians, how many would be Unchristian to Christ if they lived in Jesus' time.)

Rhetorical questions and musings aside, I feel there is often a sad, strange diachotomy between the living and dead in art. Highly prolific artists have come and gone and some have been celebrities - Picasso and Warhol for instance. 

And yet, people are not adoringly drawn to their works. Not so much the modern works - most of the Gemeente showcaing the moderns was empty and the exhibition there echoing with distant footsteps. 

Not to say modern art is unloving (most of the time I feel it lacks beauty and tenderness), I just don't think most people, including art curators and critics have the brains or wherewithall to see what is great without the hype and politics surrounding the art. Human beings, for the most part are social animals (to reference Aristotle - well, to some extent) and being social there is the ailing pressure of one's peers and of course, the mob or the crowd. 

And money. 

The art I saw in the Gemeente only impressed me a little. Maybe I was missing the context. I don't know. 

I left Den Haag for Antwerpen, thinking I would visit the MAS, the new museum on the Stroom and Ruben's house. I visited the former and enjoyed myself but I was enthralled with another artist, not one found in a museum not a household name... well, not yet. 

Artis Karnisauskis, as you may well guess from the name is not a native Belgium. He hails from Latvia. He speaks in addition to his native tongue, Russian and English. And I would say, his modern art is more fascinating and moving than much of what is being produced academically. 

To get by, Artis drives to Brugge and sells his more commercial pieces, sepia scenes of the medieval town in a market square where American, Canadian and British tourist gobble up his work. In themselves, these pieces have a timeless quality, remarkably melancholy. Looking at them, the buildings and towers and the canals seem to shimmer as if the viewer were peering at the scenes in a dream. They look like at any minute the scene will shiver into a fade and we will lose them forever. 

His more abstract art is more intellectual and less romantic but still, there is something baffling, fascinting and heartfelt in them.

Take for instance the above unnamed piece. Before heading to Cologne, I had been staying with Artis and his wife Sandra through AirBnb, a site where locals can advertise rooms available for travelers. This painting hung above my bed. 

I fell in love with this piece. You feel like you are swirling in the smog of life. But on closer inspection, everything is perfectly placed.

The lone cyclist on the left possesses something old world about him. The bike handles are red; he wears a fedora and yet there is something murky and folorn about his distance to the buildings and the high wires. Also, I noticed the dark smog halo around his head. 

I thought about the famous poet Rilke's words, his comment about modern life at the beginning of the 20th century: "Automobiles run me over."

The buildings, the street, the bus to the right are etched with a grid-like pattern. In the sky, a web of wires, interconnecting and strangling. The brown hues of the painting cause almost a kind of viewing asthma, as if we have trouble seeing the painting, inundated with the dirty chaos of daiy life. And yet the orange sky has an autumnal piece, a sadness mixed with vibrancy. It is fiery and there, admidst the lines, an angelic-like figure (perhaps a bird, it is up to our imagination) is caught but not paralized by the electrified sky.

I have seen similar scenes in Amsterdam and Vancouver. 

Another piece has the same orange-red intensity.

This one is more abstract. Two bird-like figures are floating, circling in the green atmsophere. Again, they could be birds, demons or angels. The reddish portion has a star-like quality. For me, it reminds me of a time when I was ill and felt lost inside my own body. The illness was a kind of earth, a dying home inside myself. The red ground of this painting throbs with pain and reality. Upon this ground, a third creature or flower has taken shape and form. Though there is something grim and grotesque in the image, I feel a certain hope, a future in its message. 

This last piece is perhaps the most bewildering. Either we are presented with a stuffed animal or a dead one. A sheep lies upon a white surface and with its one leg, reaches or points up, connected to a kind of kite like image. Again, it is up to the viewer to decide. Either it is a childhood toy, disused, destroyed by rough playing or more likely it is an animal dead, waiting to be used for meat. The kite's image could very well be a reference to the hell of the slaughterhouse. 

While visiting the MAS in Antwerpen, I came across some interesting words outside the Master's temporary exhibit. "Art is not a luxury and never has been. Art seeks answers to life's questions."

For Artis I sense and understand these questions from his work but at times, I feel I need to keep asking and seeing. There is nothing determined here, everything is still open to interpretation. Though the art is silent, it's the viewer and the artist that create the dialgue. 

The evening before I left, Artis told me an interesting story about an another artist he know. "He would paint a painting and then stop. He wasn't happy with it. But he wouldn't paint any more. He would keep coming down to look at it in his studio. He would spend the year looking at it until he finally liked it and realized it was done. It's all attitude. How you want to see. It's all in your head. Your heart."

Interpreting Artis' work requires both head and heart. Otherwise you'll lose something in the experience.

To contact Artis and find out more about his are and commerical work follow the link below

Artis Karnisauskis

In the Presence of the De-Sacralized and the Disappointing or The Dom in Köln

"Disappointments measure how great our hopes once were." So wrote the famous French author, Honore de Balzac. His characters were typically young men losing their illusions, understanding the world to be a den of thieves.

I think he was on to something. 

For me, Europe has proven to be a bit of a disappointment (and a den of thieves). And it's not that I was disappointed all at once.

No. 

Everything is gradual. 

I suppose this recent climax of disgust has a lot to do with my visit to the Dom in Cologne. I had visited beautiful and quiet churches and cathedrals in The Netherlands and Belgium but found this sacred space to be less so.

First things first, it's right beside the main train station. You walk in and everyone and their iphone-savvy grandchild and grandmother is snapping a photograph. The interior erratically flickers with flashes. It's like looting accept they are stealing the solemnity through their actions. Another world heritage site checked off. Here take a picture of the family in front of the nativity scene. Great. Great. Now you can go home and show your idiot relatives what everyone else is showing their idiot relatives.

I walked around but didn't take a picture. Why bother? I could see the place's beauty but it felt gutted out, like an animal on a butcher's block. There was nothing moving about the place anymore. The horde had gotten here first.

And horde doesn't mind paying or so it seems.  

If you want to walk to the top of the belfry, it costs you a few euros. To stow your coat or backpack in a locker is five euros.

You have to go to the bathroom, that's 0.50 euros thank you. 

If you want to visit the treasury, another five euros. Danke schon. 

But god, the bathrooms in Europe. I can understand the train stations. A lot of dirty people are coming and going, a lot of riff raff. Better to keep an eye out. But then I went to the movie theatre in Antwerpen. Nine euros to see a film. Sure, the seats were comfortable and the screen was big (they are in the cinema) but get this, I had to pay 0.40 euros every time I had to pee. I wish I knew this before I drank that beer in the pub. 

But nine euros. Don't you think that should cover the right to use the toilet?

Getting back to Cologne, walking around the beautiful but de-sacralized cathedral, there are beggars and other types milling about. I saw a Muslim woman bent over her cane, bare foot, holding out a paper cup. In the square, just as I was leaving, an Asian woman approached me - perhaps East Indian or Pakistani - and held out a rose to me. I was about to ask, for me when I thought better. Distrusting her, I told her I didn't have any money. She shook her head and walked away. 

What the hell? Whatever happened to asking people if you want to buy something. You just don't hold something out, a gesture of giving and expect something. (Fuck you lady and your fake gesture of good will...).

This whole continent is on the take. Especially when it comes to your bladder and bowel.

I think I need to get away from the cities. The cities bring out the worst, the greediest, the darkest in people. I've always noticed that wherever people go, you'll find a wake of their debris. Beauty is often eroded by the presence of humanity. The less people, the better.

I'm here in Cologne for a couple of days but I think I'll sneak into a museum or two and ignore the morass of civilization. The rest of the tourists here can go fuck themselves.

The Netherlands - Gezellig en Tijd

There are numerous words that can't be possibly translated into English. These words are not difficult to understand and it's not they are incomprehensible, it is that they belong to the culture in which they were cradled and raised. We can get an idea of what they mean but they can't fully leave the arms of their native language. To better explain, it would be like transplanting a significant landmark, taking the Eiffel tower for instance to New York or the pyramids to Madrid - it simply doesn't work.

Such is the word 'gezellig' (pronounced hguh-zellick) for the Dutch.

When I first arrived in Amsterdam last week, I was jet-lagged and tired. I had spent over twenty long, inpatient hours travelling and felt irritable and melancholic (weemoed in Nederlands). When I finally got into my hotel, I wanted the rest of the world, the city, the streets, time itself to shut the up and let me disappear. 

I didn't feel at home until the following evening when my second-cousin Annette and her boyfriend took me to a 'gezellig' eetcafe (eatery, cafe...) on the Lijbaansgraacht, not far from the Museum District where my hotel was located. In true Amsterdam-fashion, we had biked there and locked our bikes beside the canal. In her email to me, Annette explained the place was 'cosy', the dictionary translation of 'gezellig', but it wasn't close to the meaning.

The dinner was excellent and peaceful, so different to what I'm used to. In North America, everything is rushed, especially our meals. We eat so fast that we rarely taste anything. In the eetcafe, there were no owners or servers eager to get us in and out. They didn't have the attitude of 'the more people in and out, the better the turnover, the better the profit.' No. The place, the atmosphere was urging us more or less to stay (blijven) and be content. The feeling there was beginning to help me fashion my understanding of 'gezellig'.

I kept hearing the word as I went about the streets, following Annette and Niels to the Dom Square for Dodenherdenking, the day of national mourning in The Netherlands, a day of commemoration. At eight o'clock there is two minutes of silence. Standing amidst the crowd, the queen and her family not far away, her face on the large television screen, I could only hear the flapping wings of the pidgeons as they fluttered about the balustrades and balconies. In a city of ringing trams and methane-coughing scooters, bike paths perenially flooded with cyclists hurrying by, the stillness was vast and laden with a gentle sorrow. People had come together gladly to the Dom, pilgrims of memory to honor the past.

Later, meeting up with Annette and Niel's friends, Martin, Joep and Saunders, Martin better explained the word. "It's a getting-alongness. It's family but like everyone is your family and you just relax. You know what I mean." I nodded and watched as Saunders, the architect student mischeviously poked Marin in his belly.

At Cafe Brand, a local hang-out Joep told me to look around. This is 'gezellig' he explained. All of this. Heads close together in conversation, rounds of beers being bought. The intimacy that is cheerful and reflective, never forced, a being-human-in-a-place without worrying about when to leave or where to go next.

I also noticed the lack of televisions hanging from the walls. How often I 've walked into North American bars to be bombarded with flickering screens showing sports highlights and games, the programs and replays all geared to short attention spans.

In The Netherlands, people focus on each other, on talking and sharing. There is nothing to distract your attention, nothing superficial to take you away the moment.

The following day, Annette's father Piet came to pick me up from my hotel. In the backseat, his parents, Oom Dirk and Tante Tinni. Dirk is my Oma's youngest brother. When we were in Amsterdam Noord (North), he pointed out the homes and the places where his family used to live. Time and circumstances have changed little. The light brown brick walls and the curtained windows of these modest, quaint homes still stand in their tucked-away places. The narrow streets are still narrow. It was interesting to be in the place where my father walked and played. Oom Dirk pointed to a new building, the originally having been bombed. When I was a child, I remembered my Oma telling me the same story, how her friends were killed during an air raid.

Today, the faces here in Amsterdam Noord aren't all Dutch. The people living in my father's old neighborhood are mainly immigrants and there is more garbage on the roads and sidewalks. Nonetheless, I felt moved to see a place connected to my own history, a piece of my life before my own life began. 

Later that day and in the days to come I realized I had experienced 'gezellig' in my childhood. The four of us went on to visit Oom Dirk's sister, Corri in a nearby apartment. We had coffee and kookje and I saw many pictures. I didn't understand much of the conversation but it was like being six years old again, sitting in my Opa and Oma's living room, listening to my dad converse with his parents, the clock gently, timidly ringing in the background, the chimes tinkling through the air. The past reclaimed, so to speak.

From there we headed to father's cousin home in Monickendam, north of Amsterdam. Feijke and her husband Jacob offered to host me at the beginning of my trip. I met their son and daughter, Bart and Marleen (also second-cousins) and they took me to dinner. The family came over that evening and I met Corri's son and daughter, Kees and Seike. Kees and I talked at length about politics, history and culture and he too reminded me of the word 'gezellig'. I told him I had experienced similar mornings, afternoons and evenings long ago with my father's family back in Canada.

Besides dropping in now and then, during my childhood it was custom to visit my grandparents on Sunday mornings. Living so close to my grandparents, my family often walked over in good weather. Everyone else arrived from car, usually after church. The cousins sat in the sunroom where Oma brought us cookies and snacks while the grown-ups sat in the living room, my Opa in his favourite chair beside the window.  

Talking with Kees, images from that time tip-toed through me. I told him how much I missed that world. The earthy, chocolate aromas of mocha moving from room to room, the smell of cookies on the plate, the Delft-blue porcelain on the shelves. And of course, the conversation, how the Dutch language traveled boistrously from the living room to the sunroom, the stories, the arguments and of course the laughter. When my Opa died in 1997, the 'gezellig' in my life disappeared or better yet, was dismantled. There were still Sunday morning coffee at Oma's but it was different. The language was still spoken but less joy in the air. My uncles and aunts still gathered but perhaps more out of fear of the future - how soon Oma would die? - than through the original spirit of coming together. I still went but none of my cousins bothered anymore, their lives being busier and more concerned about work and school.

I suppose for me and many others it is true to say there would be no apprecition of 'gezellig' without the presence and impact of time or tijd.

The Dutch are very aware of time. Clocks are everywhere, on churches, on the towers of town halls (stadhuisen) and in museums. In the Rijks, for example, there is a display showing a human Grandfather clock by artist Martin Baas. It appears that a man is trapped inside and with every passing minute, he erases the minute hand of the clock and draws it anew to keep the correct time. The screen on which the face of the clock is displayed looks frosted-over and the man behind it blurred. Baas may be pointing to the blurr of time, how sad and insignificant we are, nameless and faceless.

Such melancholic art is not foreign to The Netherlands. In the Golden Age of Dutch painting, many of the masters created still lifes (or stilleven). On the surface these paintings depict seemingly harmless groupings of flowers, food, books and other objects. But on closer inspection, the flowers are a little wilted, the fruit is going bad and the cup is overturned. The page in the book says 'finis' and the hour-glass with its draining sand is almost done. Everything points to death and time's passing. 

Sometimes the 'momento mori' ('you too will die') is obvious: a skull sits on the pile of books, indicating the futility of life and learning. 

Sometimes the grouping's message is subtle - the walnuts here, for instance. You have to crack them open before you can enjoy them, pointing to how in time, you must live and by living, you are always nearing death, the moment disappearing through its flow and all the pleasures inherit. What else is there? these paintings seem to also ask. If we don't eat the fruit, it will rot without us. If we don't read the books, how else will we learn. We have no choice. The glass of wine or beer must be exhausted otherwise you can't enjoy it without drinking it.

The same with us. The people in our lives, even to love someone else, to hold them, kiss them, talk with them all eventually and irrevocably mean we must prepare ourselves for losing them or being lost. 

Though we don't see people in these pictures, we do manage to see ourselves. The objects are us, the overturned glass like a man lying in his death bed.

(Speaking of art and time, when I visited the Rembrandthuis, I saw how time-consuming it is to make oil paint. The musuem employee demonstrated how the artist had to take oil and powdered stone and mix them using a block-like pummel on a marble board. Rembrandt used fourteen colours. And I could see why. Not only did it take awhile to mix the paint but also the muscle-work required could make you tired. Moving the stone around on the board, the oil and powder together form a sticky substance and you have to hold on and force it.)

Reflecting on our death, we can understand why art is so precious and at times, inexplicably expensive. The artist is dead. They can no longer give us their talent and create their singular, all-too-human beauty and vision. They lived in time, their scenes expressed moments in time, fleeting but made eternal through their work. No more will they paint their drinking peasants, their Biblical scenes or their still lifes. For this we appreciate them but maybe we can't always explain it.

Like with artists, we hold on to whatever trace we can of the people who have passed on before us, what they gave us, what in turn becomes priceless to us.

Sitting with Oom Dirk, the day after the above mentioned family gathering, going through his photoalbums, it felt like I was sitting with my Opa once again, enjoying his presence, his humor, his memories. It was as if time decided to be kind, bringing me a gift instead of taking something or someone away, as if the moments of those long ago Sunday afternoons were in fact lines in a poem and being here in Holland, I could hear the accompanying rhyme.

I have travelled and lived in many places in Canada but never felt as close to the beauty of my past as I felt sitting there with the smell of coffee in the air, the taste of it on my palate and almondel kookje in my hand. And after the coffee and snack, I had some jenever - Dutch gin - and it was like I was having a drink with my Opa.

Now, I know what I've been searching for. And it's nice to give it a name. In English, it is nameless but here in The Netherlands it is alive and important. It's everywhere. In the vibrant, spacious town squares (groot markts) lined with 17th and 18th century houses, in the restaurants, and the brown cafes with their cheery flow of Dutch discussions. Even in the museums. I know I've seen hints of it in the art I've loved and studied since high school and university: the tender, timeless scenes from Vermeer, his milk maid, the jovial group portraits of Hals, soldiers with raised glasses and the works of Rembrandt, paintings of himself and his family, all of them showing a dignity mixed with wistfulness and wonder.

Gezellig. It's in the blood. My blood as well. Seeing my grandfather's face again I feel a familial, timeless peace, a homesickness healed.

Yes...a beautiful word. Untranslatable. I'm finding it everywhere. In the photographs, the conversations, the streets, canals, the people... always the people...