Mother and Child - With Commentary
Rick Visser, Mother and Child, 2007 oil on canvas, 30 x 24" (76.2 x 60.96 cm), collection of the artist.
It was Francis Bacon’s view that the artist's job is to always deepen the mystery. In order to do this, artists often hide their sources. Nevertheless, the following comments reveal two of the sources I used for this painting.
My thought is that the comments I offer here may actually deepen the mystery and at the same time connect very directly with a long and honored art tradition.
The main source for my ‘Mother and Child' was the image below, painted by Picasso in 1907. Elizabeth Cowling, in her valuable book, ‘Picasso: Style and Meaning,’ describes Picasso's work this way: "The ‘mask-like heads, painted fiery red, overlap and merge and, as a united front, the couple stare dolefully at the viewer with enormously dilated eyes....the ferocious squatting figure on the right of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon...has a more than passing likeness to the mother (p.473-74)."
Mother and Child, Picasso, 1907 oil on canvas, approx 31x23 in
This painting was done during Picasso’s first exorcist period. Picasso spoke of artworks as "weapons . . . against everything . . . against unknown, threatening spirits," and he referred to 'Les Demoiselles d'Avignon' as his first exorcism painting.
In a recent article in the Online Wall Street Journal (July 21, 2007), Michael Fitzgerald stated that, “When Picasso spoke about art being a weapon, he was specifically describing African "fetishes." He called them defensive weapons: "They're tools. If we give spirits a form, we become independent." In this sense, the splintered spaces and awesome creatures of "Les Demoiselles" vividly embody looming malevolent and seductive forces -- and stop them in their tracks….”
With the words ‘malevolent and seductive forces' still in mind, look at the next image that influenced my work. It is a photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt taken four months after the bombing of Hiroshima. He came upon the two of them looking at some vegetables they were attempting to grow in the midst of the rubble.
Mother and Child, Alfred Eisenstaedt, 1945, photograph
This image held me in its grip during the three days I worked on this painting. As the work developed, the force of this image became more and more irrepressible. Strangely, it was the print pattern on the child's clothing that led me forward. The little diamonds scattered across his outfit were the only hints of light and delight in this devastating scene.
I had many difficult dreams after the second night of work, dreams that involved my immediate family traversing narrow bridges over deep gorges, car crashes, and falling down flights of stairs. I understood such mental activity as part of the process, an indication that I was getting into the territory: it was getting ‘up close and personal.’
I arrived at a resolution of the painting just before midnight of the third day. It was an arduous evening of work lasting about three and a half hours. At one point, I nearly lost the image...I thought, in fact, that I had lost it...but, somehow, I found a way to move forward, inch by inch (I don't know how), as if digging out of the rubble of Eisenstaedt’s photograph. Four days later, I returned to it and made a number of minor changes.
The demand the work placed upon me was nearly overwhelming at times and seemed to increase exponentially as I moved toward the final image, toward midnight of the third night.
Picasso once said that different motivations call for different means of expression. This piece called for a deeper and more profound mode of expression, one I had not attained before, one that I was not sure I could attain.
Of all the works I have done, this one reminded me the most of Rilke's ‘Letter on Cezanne’ from Monday, June 24, 1907; written 100 years ago, the same year (and the same time of year: summer) that Picasso painted his ‘Mother and Child.’
"...Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, to where no one can go any further. The further one goes, the more private, the more personal, the more singular an experience becomes, and the thing one is making is, finally, the necessary, irrepressible, and, as nearly as possible, definitive utterance of this singularity...Therein lies the enormous aid the work of art brings to the life of the one who must make it, --: that it is his epitome; the knot in the rosary at which his life recites a prayer, the ever-returning proof to himself of his unity and genuineness, which presents itself only to him while appearing anonymous to the outside, nameless, existing merely as necessity, as reality, as being--."
Shall we say it again? “Therein lies the enormous aid the work of art brings to the life of the one who must make it...”
