Years ago Tarragon sojourned on the North Atlantic coast, and amidst the fog and the Labrador current, something Scandinavian stole into his work. His figures turned their backs on one another, or took up station alone in empty rooms, as here. It's a stage many of us go through, but not all of us do it on canvas.
A thread of attenuated minimalism runs through Tarragon's paintings to this day, but it now expresses itself more in the landscapes than in figurative paintings. And so the nordic angst of works like this one has relaxed a bit, into a quiet sense of solitude. That's the way life goes.
I don't know anything about this painting, or if it still exists. For myself, I have decided that it shows the protagonist of Kurt Hamsun's Hunger, sitting disconsolate in a Hammershoi interior. He is dreaming, perhaps, of richer colour and thicker paint.
Ah, art school angst, know it well.
ReplyDeleteWhen I write down these notes accompanied by drawings, it is not in order to de-scribe my own life. It is important for me to study the various inherited phenomena that form the life and the destiny of a human being, especially the most common forms of madness. I am making a study of the soul, as I can observe myself closely and use myself as an anatomical testing-ground for this soul study.
ReplyDeleteEdvard Munch Notes of a Genius in "Scandinavian Words,"