Does The Artist Know?

I seriously love this painting. It’s called “I Am Half Sick of Shadows”. I have several postcard versions of it tucked around the house, I think I may have even been gifted with a t-shirt emblazoned with it. Someday I hope to sit in front of it at a museum and swoon. I don’t think I’ll ever not want to look at this piece.

I appreciate its technical mastery, the artist’s (William Waterhouse) use of bold colour and fine detail. The fact that it’s based on a line from “The Lady of Shalott” doesn’t hurt either (literary references get me every time). There are many reasons why it’s a well-known, well-lauded piece.

What appeals to me most, however, is the look on the subject’s face, and her posture. This painting, to put it in modern terms, is giving a vibe. To my beleaguered, 21st century eye, it suggests things like:

·      I’m bloody exhausted.

·      My back is killing me.

·      Why am I stuck here, in front of this stupid loom?

·      FML, I could be frolicking in a meadow somewhere with fairies.

When I first saw it, I immediately looked up Waterhouse and the rest of his work, and found that all of his stuff is “giving a vibe”. Most of his paintings centre around a female subject, sometimes mythical, sometimes historical, but all of them seem to have been sent the same memo. They strike similar poses, caught in the midst of some task, at work, focused and serious. Their faces all wear candid, unguarded expressions of fatigue, pensiveness, sometimes frustration.

I started noticing other artists and paintings that felt the same to me. There was Evelyn de Morgan’s “Cassandra”, furrowing her brow and yanking on her hair as the city behind her goes up in smoke.  My mind jumped back to being in front of The Mona Lisa at the Louvre, seeing the bags under her eyes close-up and thinking she looked tired and nonplussed.

To me, all of these paintings speak of angst, of weariness, of being fed up. These aren’t portraits of women in the midst of a celebration, or a good hair day. They’re snapshots of women with an abundant, taxing mental load. They mutter “Ugh” and “Meh”. They only way they could do so more explicitly is if they included an eye roll or a subtly-placed extended middle finger. The youngest of them is over a century old, but it still bears an eerie similarity to the faces of women at the end of the day, when they think no one’s looking. You see these expressions, these gestures of frustration and fatigue, this tell-tale slump on all kinds of people right now.

I too, am “half sick of shadows” at the moment. No, I’m full-on sick of shadows. There are so many shadows, and compared to many other women, I don’t have that many to contend with. I’m stuck behind a screen for most of the day, instead of a loom, but my back is also stiff, and I tend to stare off into the distance. I'm tired, but I'm working. Yeah, I care, but I'm restless. I'm here, but I'm really gone. I'm wrong and I'm sorry, baby. I get you, Lady of Shallott (apparently Alannis Morisette does too).

This is a big part of what art is supposed to do, isn’t it? The technical skill in all of these paintings is, of course, important and impressive, but isn’t it much more of a flex for an artist to be able to say that more than a hundred years later, some random stranger can look at one’s work and think “I get you”? Do Waterhouse, and de Morgan and da Vinci, wherever they are, know that they’ve captured these moods in such a way that they’re extending a little sprout of human understanding to someone in a very different world than the one they knew?

Please, please, pretty please, don’t dismiss the importance of art or the people who make it, especially at a time like this. There’s so much comfort and so much connection to be found in a painting, or a song, a dance, a poem... I guarantee there’s one something there for everyone, something that just sums up their slice of the human condition perfectly. Don’t be snobby, or feel sheepish for liking what’s unpopular or unusual (along with my fondness for Waterhouse, I’m also quite hung up on old Peanuts comics, and I’m not at all sorry). Some artist somewhere, at some point in time, will have created something that speaks to your particular set of shadows in a way that nothing else can. You’ll know it when you see it, and you’ll be glad you took time to give it a proper once-over.

If you are one of those creative types, please don’t get discouraged and stop making stuff, even when you don’t know if anyone’s looking. Put stuff out there. Share it any chance you get. Someday you too may reach someone who is “half-sick of shadows”, maybe someone whose shadows coincide with yours, maybe even someone who is entirely overcome with darkness. This is vital work, this business of sharing our shadows. You may not have realized it when you first picked up a paintbrush/pen/tap shoes/trumpet, but this is the job, and thank you for doing it.