An aesthete from desert
"In 1960s a newborn baby's cry breaks the silence of the desert on the outskirt of an Aboriginal settlement.
She is born under a tree int he bush. Her name is 'Shell on Sand', after the place her child spirit came from.
It is a hard world that she has been born into. Central Australia is in drought.
She is the ninth child her mother has carried; four have died in infancy in the previous decade.
She is tiny, sickly looking the 'runt of the litter'.
Her mother makes a decision that is as old and harsh as the desert.
She decides to leave the baby girl where she has been born, to be killed by a snake."
We are sitting on a beach on the North Western Australian shore. It is a warm autumn day and the well-known Aboriginal painter is telling me the story of her life.
"I was left in the small shade of a burned tree," she pauses, legs crossed under her skirt, feet bare, staring at the coarse sand:
"In the last minute my mother changed her mind and came back for me, I am eternally grateful to her...
...otherwise I would miss to see all this beauty around me." She smiles her toothless smile.
"I was raised in humpies and promised in marriage at birth."
"Pregnant at 13 to a young man who grew to like the taste of bashing me and then my son died."
The memory of her dead son casts her suddenly into silence.
She ran away from her drunk husband and fell in love with a white man.
Their life roads joined in one, he healed her wounds, she started to paint...
She could see the spirit of her dead son everywhere around her...in the skin of a wild animal...
in the seagrass washed on the shore...
in the creek running wild through her dry country after rainy season...
in the colour of the rocks that shelter the settlement of her childhood....
Every morning she travels far into the desert, her home, to find the natural colours to mix and to paint with...
Every evening she sits next to creek bed soaking the beauty around her...
getting inspiration for the next painting...
the colours, the moods, the lines, everything is there in front of her, she just needs to look carefully and remember it....
Her story is told and I am sad but also in a blissed-out state of mine I suddenly touch a little shell next to my feet, just to feel what the texture is.
"I will paint this for you," she suddenly says: "The hand, the attachment of a person to a natural object, the light, it is a perfect portrait of you."
"Paint me like this?" I check my ruffled hair and dirty shorts, " Better not, I have to make myself more presentable."
She shakes her head sadly: "You, white people don't know anything about beauty, you just look for perfection...
I suddenly felt very ashamed, but she just takes my hand: "Come back and I will show you a beautiful world inhabited by pure and sincere people - a world that is almost at reach...
but doesn't exist for real." I kiss her good bye and she smiles for the last time: " In this world world, living, loving and dying are desirable, just come back and I show you..."
'Aesthete refers to a lover of art'
I read in a dictionary
imagining
an old and wealthy
hiding his priceless collection
then lending it
with a heavy heart
to one of those arty places.
Becoming a teacher
of Art,
an aesthete
is suddenly
an ordinary person
just like you and me,
sensitive to beauty,
with open heart
and attentive eyes
appreciating life around.
Aesthetic
relates to beauty
and good taste.
A subjective choice,
we make
in our daily lives,
but we all
find beauty
inevitably
in the arms of the person
we love
and suddenly realize
a simple life
really can be
a perfect life.
Aesthetics is the subject
of any conversation
among students of Art:
"Aestheticism is the study
of beauty
arising
from harmonious arrangement
of an eye-pleasing parts."
They say,
forgetting
that a myriad
of imperfections
unique to each part
make the beauty lasts.
And what about womanly beauty
of a dangerously bewitching kind,
over-represented in every type of art.
The unravelling of secrets,
the evocation of her desires,
a place shrowded in myth
for many of her admirers.
Once he find his beauty,
his object of desire,
he becomes
an aesthete of the heart.
As a photographer in a new landscape
he has to learn
his camera all over again.
He has to understand
how the light falls,
so he can capture
the beauty in her best.
It is up to her
to learn
how to live
in the arms
of her partner
and through the patterns
of her longings
and losses,
moments of being
a beauty on a string
learns to beautify the place around her.
"You should never neglect the edge of your vision,"
She reminds him sadly:
"It's there that something
is likely to reveal itself,
the development of wisdom
against a larger frame
of questions
that no one can answer."
He nodds
with absent present
slowly creating
a portrait of her
window to her soul.
He already knows
there is more to a great image
that a likeness to its subject.
A closer look,
her perfect stillness,
until he notices
those few
shifts in movement,
barely perceptible.
She became his lover
object of his art
and now she is leaving.
Portrait that has gone so far
into making his own character
out of this person
before an artist.
it really does raise
a lot of questions
about how we define art.
She stopped being
just being,
to become
an artist,
the creator
of the beautiful things,
that unlike her
will last.
Meditation on art,
the place of women in it,
their beauty
and their creativity,
the balance required
for the women artists of today
to sculpt a place for art
within the demands of love
and domesticity.
Beauty is known
for residing
in the limited spaces
where life reality and fiction meet,
often mediated by the poetic.
Aesthetes of my kind often ask,
where to find,
beautiful,
attractive
gorgeous,
ravishing
in a powerful sensual way
luscious,
voluptuous
beautifully dignified
delicately beautiful
exquisite...and so on...
It is all hidden
in the small transactions
of everyday life,
alongside
shared intimacies,
a sense of the human
of generosity
and charm,
familiar landscapes,
suburbs,
backyards,
passing scenes
outside
train or car windows.
A sense of what exists
outside the body
or just outside the mind,
especially
in heightened
states
stillness
of sleep
a shifting
and subtle exploration
of creativity
darkness
dreaming
and night
are tied inevitably
to the imagination
to the unconscious
and the irrational
alongside this
wild imagination
and the domestic
coexist
and the small,
practical details of lives
a kind of universality
that is practical and wordly
exists alongside miracle and creation,
in all of this
beauty of every kind resides.
Art is always about results
and there is no one way
of getting there...
there is a constant dialogue
between different ways
of accomplishing
the beautiful image.
The thing about art
it's always going to surprise you
so you are not going to imagine
what is coming,
the new thing
will always be
the thing you didn't expect.
It's enigma,
we often look up
for something
extraordinary
just to find out
a banal,
everyday scene
to take our breath away
and suddenly
ordinary
becomes
so memorable
so untrivial...
Art today,
as well as art of yesterday,
always presented us
with what we think we know
and then
offer us a totally different view.
Artists through their art
take us where are no roads,
to explore the new ways,
to go beyond
mere likeness and accuracy
and dwelve into something
deeper
something which reveals
the layers beneath the physical surface,
it has to tell a story,
a larger narrative
about us
and the world
we don't yet know....
'Aesthete' is my favourite English word,
because it describes you and me
and everyone
who is brave enough
to go to places
where others went before
and said
there is nothing to see....
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