[↑] Adam Miller – Fallout from Compositions series (2012); [+] Akseli Gallen-Kallela – By the River of Tuonela (1903); [↓] All Fine Girls – Vika (201X)
I save things as drafts thinking to myself: self, this belongs here.
Unfortunately–often when it comes to composing some sort of accompanying text, my thoughts scatter like roaches when you flip the light switch.
Dredging through drafts, trying to figure out items to post–it occurred to me that it’s the expressions in these that appeal to me.
In the top image, the woman has an expression which–independent of the title–comes across as mismatched with her surroundings. She looks wild-eyed and terrified except at the same time she’s more engaged than those around her. When I discovered the painting is titled ‘Fallout,’ something finally clicked for me: she’s one of those people who only ever feels fully alive responding to and thrilling in abject chaos and catastrophic tumult.
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The second painting is based on a the Kalevala–roughly like a cross between the Aeneid and the Icelandic sagas except being fundamentally Finnish (as best as I can tell). The subject of the painting consists of the hero being tasked with completing three difficult tasks, the third of which is slaying a swan on the river Tuonela.
In the painting, the hero (Lemminkäinen) departs in his canoe.
Additional context: this painting was a sketch for a fresco in a mausoleum dedicated to the memory of the daughter of a prominent businessman who died at age eleven. It’s presumably her with the braid trailing down her back and her budding breast exposed, invisible to the other gathered onlookers.
Everything about her suggests that although she does not know what she has lost, she understands what the loss has cost her in a way that no one else can or will.
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I am unbelievably conflicted about posting this image. It’s porn and not even good porn. Further, I think it is unspeakably heinous when grown ass men refer to women they are attracted to or wish to pursue romantically as ‘girls’–it’s gross and a huge red flag. (And I absolutely judge men I hear do this as total creeps.)
In my experience, to achieve orgasm, you have to stop thinking, stop trying to get off, let go and surrender to an unmediated experience of physical sensation.
By letting go, you can just kind of float there and wait for it like a wave rolling in from the sea. But in letting go, you can also reach for something.
I won’t presume to know what this young woman is experiencing but she is reaching–and with this stunning, febrile desperation. It’s breath-taking to stare at, honestly.
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When it comes down to it, these expressions are all unusual to witness in person–let alone in visual media. What impresses me and caused me to eventually put them all in the same place is that they are all expressions I’ve seen in the mirror, especially Vika’s desperate reaching. That’s so close to home, I have trouble fighting to urge to claim this as an ersatz self-portrait.
Acetylene Eyes 