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| THE ORIGINAL STATE OF INNOCENCE. WOMAN IN A LANDSCAPE. Ilze Avotiņa Elita Ansone | |
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While researching the properties of cocaine, Sigmund Freud1 discovered its anaesthetic effects. Around the same time, at the end of the 19th century, a number of directions in art appeared, which painter Ilze Avotiņa was to refer to in her art one hundred years later. Of the representatives of the new directions, the Symbolists in particular held the "therapeutic properties" of cocaine in high regard. For Avotiņa nature provides the narcotic effect - an incomparably more healthy choice. However, nature and cocaine have similar properties - they both expand the state of awareness and they are both addictive.
For Avotiņa painting is a way of life: creative fulfilment, her philosophy, profession, work, her livelihood, life itself. I don't think she can manage without painting - here's the dependence. Although fulfilment is also in her daughters Katrīna and Kristīne Luīze - both painters, too. "Painting for me is like submitting to some higher power, like a man loves a woman, like a mother loves her child, like a flower coming into blossom in the garden."2 Ilze is an image herself. The woman as a brilliant blossom in the landscape. The woman in town that passers-by take joy in looking at. The most exotic being at exhibition openings. The owner of countless hats. The wearer of eccentric clothes. A great photo model. She pays attention to each detail, everything is important. People's relationships, conversation, the work to be done. All have meaning. She matches frames to paintings as she does her dresses. And her solo exhibition "The Mutating Immutable" in the State Museum of Art will have earned an exceptionally splendid, gilded setting. Every one of the exhibits will have become a treasure of the museum. Flicking through the huge pile of press cuttings of reviews of her exhibition work over thirty years, one catches my eye: "I have fantastic contact with nature. I don't even feel I'm painting. When I've done thinking and talking to myself internally, I suddenly realise that I've probably been painting."3 The stories on painting and the Avotiņa family in articles and interviews are most often centred on their house in the country, "Kalna Murēni" in Liezēre Parish. They tell of the impressions of the morning sunlight in summer, painting against the light with a heightened sense of nature. The story of the special state that can be achieved in nature that is full of sounds - the buzzing of grasshoppers, gadflies, flies and mosquitoes -, where every tree and grass has a different energy, where everything shimmers and is overflowing with life, leads one to think of a state of meditative trance that can be achieved by submitting oneself to all that madness that takes place on a fruitful summer's day. The brief quote shows that painting in a state that coincides with the rhythm of nature's pulse goes beyond one's self-control. And this in turn makes us think of the person to research the sphere of the unconscious psyche. We have to thank him for our knowledge of the subconscious and its influence on human behaviour. Freud's views on the importance of sexuality on the states of a person's psyche were expanded by his youngest colleague Jung4. However, both were to disagree because Jung considered religious and dream symbols, the philosophical and mystical aspects to be just as important as sexuality. Jung also regarded the psyche to be a self-regulating system and in this respect, I think, Avotiņa has intuitively chosen the therapeutic philosophy of painting for her sensitive being - a one hundred per cent positive attitude to the world, love for one's neighbour and the drawing of strength from nature. Avotiņa has painted genre scenes, portraits and landscapes, still lifes as well as nudes. Within the boundaries of the genre, the works are composed traditionally, even canonically. During the 1980s family members appear in cosy situations in interiors and landscapes; in her portraits the models are the people closest to her, her daughters and cats. Still lifes feature pumpkins, jugs and flowers but in her landscapes we see forests, meadows, gardens, a fantastic lake and even towns and nudes. From the compositional and narrative aspect, there is nothing new but Avotiņa's painting is unique in the context of Latvian art. It is like a colourful exotic flower that stands out with its brilliance on the surrounding background of subdued nature. When Avotiņa graduated from the Latvian Academy of Art in 19795, there was a noticeable passion for French Modernists, Post-Impressionists and Impressionists among the young artists. Impressionism was the first Western style of art to be "allowed" into the Soviet Union. Impressionism gave Avotiņa a sense of the importance of light and a shimmering chiaroscuro in the plane of the painting. However, her creative beginnings were marked by saturated colouring of half tones, characteristic of the Nabis group, a spirituality of the simple everyday, intimacy that also has symbolic meaning. "Sunday" (1981) and "Hair Combing" (1982)6 gives the depicted activity a sacredness full of meaning, an enlightened calm that verges on the ideals of the renaissance. A whole series of portraits from the 80s and 90s took the form of ornamental compositions in the plane giving her painting a decorative value in themselves for example, "Homage to the Teacher" (1985-1993), "Self-portrait" (1987). Alongside these compositions of basically uniform fields, there were also genre paintings with the shimmering world of the Impressionists. Landscapes were given ornamental qualities. Foliage, branches and trees are formed by dark contouring within which the light glitters. Fantastic scenes take shape like a world of hyperbole that gives the viewer the impression of a dream, vision or a folk tale. The essence of Avotiņa's creativity of the 80s is concentrated in the 1990 work "The Kiss" - an exotic forest scene where everything is vibrating, swaying with a wave-like motion and optically merging while concentrating an unbearable crescendo in the centre of the painting; a head spinning, surreal view of nowhere land; a metaphorical kiss for the feeling of timelessness and weightlessness. It may well be that the impulses radiated by the sun, when the entire atmosphere vibrates, are not only an optical effect but they also awaken erotic sensitivity. In 1991 the artist returned from Paris with two small bowls in luminescent green and red acrylic. In 1992 she produced the painting "Sweet Aroma". Its contrast of red and green hits the eye and from the intensity of colour aspect, Avotiņa surpasses the Fauvists, let alone the Post-Impressionists. The new colouring of her work leads rather to the objective espoused by the Surrealists - to paint a dream, an unusual state of consciousness, hallucinations, if you will, in order to touch the secrets of the subconscious. To paint nature itself, the surroundings or some event is not an aim; her aim is to explore man's intimate and pulsating inner life in unison with the rhythms of the cosmos. The red-hot colouring of "Sweet Aroma" (a red woman on the background of a green fern) marked the beginning of a remarkable new period in Avotiņa's painting. Ten years later, in 2002 and 2003, another two works were produced with the same title giving a triptych - a hymn to youth and love. During the 90s Avotiņa worked productively on landscapes but these were not simply views of nature. The message in her landscapes is rooted in a kind of philosophy of the life of nature. She came to this through personal experience. From a content point of view, they may be interpreted symbolically as scenes from the living world. They have a supernatural, cosmic dimension where spirals sparkle, dots pulsate, the atmosphere shimmers and the world breathes. In its way this is a mystical attitude towards nature, irrationally based on intuitive perception. Nature is a huge, fathomless, living being. Just like the cosmos. The artist gained special experience painting in the morning hours: "... when a dew drop meets a sun ray something happens. It is as if the systems of the worlds unite and exchange information."7 This pagan-like worship of nature can be easily read in her work at the turn of the millennium - "Solstice for the New Century" (2000). An ancient tribe in a ritual dance around a bonfire; a dark, starry night and the flames of the bonfire shoot up into the sky like a shaft of light flowing with sparks to unite with the universe. This is esoteric mysticism together with human hopes and anticipation. In the new millennium, paintings heavy with symbolic detail begin to appear quite often. Alongside relationships between symbols, in "Guardian Angel" (2000) we also see post-modern quotation: Leonardo's angel and an Egyptian hare, a medieval castle and above them a floral ornament; this all goes to form a complex rebus on the theme of "the guardian angel of animals during the hunting season". Works in which each element has symbolic meaning were created for thematic exhibitions by various galleries. The most recent this year is "Dedication to the Solstice and Cheese". Of course, people also exist in the world space. Avotiņa was inspired to concentrate her attention on expressions of man's bodily existence for "The Joy of Being", an exhibition of figural painting in the State Museum of Art in 1999. For this she produced nudes and portraits in which the sparkle and ornamental have gone, but we see the return of the Fauvist division of areas, a schematically simpler and more linear style of painting. The intensive colouring is still there and the models are like phosphorescent elements, luminescent as they radiate their inner concentrated energy. To highlight man's bodily significance in a languishing society was healthy. In Avotiņa's world of ideals there is no place for everyday cares and the prose of ordinary life. In 2000 she painted a landscape of paradise. This was the 8 metres long frieze "The Kiss of the Lake" - a fantastic, light and expansive landscape, a land of real happiness. The lake in this painting symbolises life's happy moments, yet the lake is real; it's by the artist's house in the country. Avotiņa recalls the sense of lightness she felt while painting it; absolute positivism as she included all that a person can remember of the best in nature - childhood memories, all the good feelings and experiences. Consciously setting herself positive tasks is like reciting a mantra; by repeating one and the same sound, its meaning accumulates and becomes reality as a result. In the symbolism of dreams, a lake means the feminine or the unknown. Archetypically it is the place where the beings of the underworld dwell - the fairies, elves, nymphs and water spirits that enchant humans. In the painting we get the powerful feeling that its creation was dictated by the subconscious. Avotiņa never justifies her choice of subjects and genres conceptually. Her gardens, forests and lakes come about through the inspiration of some original state of innocence. The ability to be genuinely joyful, to wonder at the glory of nature, to differentiate clearly between good and evil are an affirmation of Avotiņa's chosen path to a more pure level of spiritual development.n 1 Sigmund Freud (1865-1939), Austrian doctor, founder of psychoanalysis. 2 From the annotation to the 1996 solo exhibition in the "Centrs" gallery. 3 Lancdorfa, S. Freedom was born as the dog cheered // Rigas Balss, 1996, 6 March. 4 Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), Swiss psychologist, founder of the analytical concept of the personality in its philosophical, religious and mystical aspects. 5 Avotiņa graduated from the monumental painting masterclass run by Indulis Zariņš. 6 Purchased by the Ministry of Culture of the RSFSR. 7 Vanaga, A. Negribu atgriezties tumsā. [Interview with I.Avotiņa] // Sieviete, 1996, No. 6. | |
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