Completed Painting: 'Das Schloss 1 [vouch.speared.hooked.]

 

'Das Schloss 1 (vouch.speared.hooked)', Acrylics, Paper Collage & Paint Pen on Panel,
600 mm x 600 mm, 2022

Here's the completed version of one of the in-progress pieces teased here back in July. It's fair to say that progress was a little stilted over the summer period for various reasons, but work continues at whatever pace it can. Having several pieces simultaneously in play, and allowing numerous layered narratives to accumulate organically through possibly extended periods of reflection, actually feel like not altogether regrettable parts of the process right now.

I think I am moderately pleased with the way this one seems to tug at several possible threads of an increasingly tangled rhizome, whilst establishing a degree of stratified formal 'coherence' at the same time. Any attempt to provide a simplistic explanation feels harder than ever at this point, but maybe that's no bad thing either.

Perhaps the following quotations can supply some tentative clues instead...

"K. began to take notice. So the castle had appointed him land surveyor. On the one hand this was to his disadvantage, since it showed they knew all they needed to know about him up at the castle, had weighed up the balance of forces, and were entering the fray with a smile. But on the other hand it was also to his advantage, because it showed, he felt, that they underestimated him and that he was going to have more freedom than he might have hoped for at the outset. And if they thought that with his intellectually no doubt superior recognition of his land surveyorship they could keep him in a perfect state of fright, then they were wrong, it sent a little shiver down his spine, that was all." [1.]

"If I had not been so determined to set seriously to work, I might have made an effort to start at once. But given that my resolve was unbreakable, given that within twenty-four hours, inside the empty frame of tomorrow where everything fitted so perfectly because it was not today, my best intentions would easily take material shape, it was really preferable not to think of beginning things on an evening when I was not quite ready - and of course the following days were to be no better suited to beginning things.

Unfortunately, tomorrow turned out not to be that broad, bright, outward-looking day that I had feverishly looked forward to. When it ended, my idleness and hard struggle against my inner obstacles had just lasted for another twenty-four hours. After a few days, when my projects had still not come to anything, when some of my hope that they would come to something had faded, and with some of it some of the courage I required in order to subordinate everything to my coming achievement, I went back to staying up late, as I now lacked my incentive (the certain knowledge that the great work would be begun by the following morning) to go to bed early on any given evening." [2.]

"There are natures purely contemplative, completely unsuited for action, who nevertheless, under mysterious unknown impulses, act sometimes with a rapidity of which they would suppose themselves incapable.

"Those for instance who, afraid their concierge may have bad news for them, pace an hour timorously before daring to go in; those who hold letters for two weeks before opening them, or wait six months to take some step that has been immediately necessary for a year already - but sometimes abruptly feel precipitated into action by an irresistible force, like an arrow leaving the bow. Moralists and doctors, who claim to know everything, fail to explain from whence so sudden a mad energy comes to these lazy, voluptuous souls and why, incapable of the simplest and most necessary things, they find at certain moments a spurt of first class courage to execute the most absurd and even most dangerous actions." [3.]

[1.]: Franz Kafka, 'The Castle' (Trans. J. Underwood), London, Penguin, 1997/1926

[2.]: Marcel Proust, 'In Search of Lost Time, Volume 2: In The Shadow Of Young Girls In Flower' (Trans. James Grieve), London, Penguin, 2002/1919

[3.]: Charles Baudelaire, 'The Bad Glazier' (Trans. Keith Waldrop), From 'Paris Spleen', Middletown, CT, Wesleyan Univ. Press, 2009/1869.