meditations on some blobs of paint

It’s a precious skill as an art gallery visitor: the ability to fully concentrate on a painting, amidst the comings & goings and the whispers & shouts of one’s fellow visitors. 

Mind you, this concentration is not a question of simply blocking out one’s surroundings, it is not a matter of withdrawing in a noise-cancelling lonely vacuum. 

 It’s rather about welcoming the gallery space with its thronging visitors as a safe surrounding conducive to all manners of meditation (including one’s own) in front of cherished images.

On my way to the rooms with the Dutch painters, I was stopped in my tracks by a sign “Silence! Mindfulness Session Going On!”  Behind the sign, a group of people was sitting on folding chairs, looking intently at a Frans Hals painting, while listening to their Mindfulness Coach, who, speaking in a low appeasing voice, invited her audience , “to look at the painting and, at the same time , to become aware of their own sensations”.

I might have been expected to snigger at the new-fangled sign with the over-hyped term, at the meekness of the group. But then I didn’t, because, obviously, paintings do invite to contemplation and meditation, they indeed can induce a state of absorption and aesthetic bliss. And instead of an isolated & transient self-absorption, they offer a connection to (relatively) durable images and stories, which have been meaningful for so many people throughout the ages.   So, hype aside, maybe it’s all the better, if ‘mindfulness’ courses bring people to the museum, teaching them how to sit still and to look at a painting.

Un-aided by folding chair or coach, I engaged in my own kind of meditations – standing quietly in front of a painting by Emanuel de Witte.  

 A 17^th C Dutch painter of mainly church interiors, de Witte in our age has often been less highly regarded than the sternly abstract Saenredam – being considered as (too) anecdotic, (too) pleasingly painterly. 

But each time I meet one of his paintings, I stand watching in bliss – captivated by their luminosity, their limpid sensation of space & time. 

The light, oh the light!  The happiness of witnessing that light filtering through the church windows.  The joy of seeing those pillars and tiles dappled with light – the immersion into that atmosphere suffused by light.    

Staring intently at some flecks of light on the pillars – one gets get mesmerized by the magical transformation of tactile blobs of paint into light. From modest matter to mystical light? 

What kind of optical laws govern this interaction of painterly matter and light and vision?  The camera is fooled even more than the naked eye.  It simply records and shows "light" – and it takes a lot of zooming and processing to bring out the texture of the paint that de Witte so brilliantly splodged on these pillars.