Fionn Wilson

This painting was inspired by a photograph belonging to my friend, the artist and writer Albina von Klix, of herself and her sister Luda when they were young. I hoped to capture some of the intensity of expression that children have. They don’t guard their feelings and their faces, as a result, are often tidal waves of visual emotion. This is a portrait of one second in time. The expressions would likely have changed in the next second.

Albina wrote about the painting as below. I was very moved by her response:

On the portrait by Fionn Wilson

What a great surprise I had this morning. It was 4am in New York when I opened Facebook, first it opens here on “Clintondale computer” as Jack’s Facebook. I saw this face, the face on the right, just one face — it was published as a portrait. I was overwhelmed with some obscure but very strong feeling of recognition. It was like in a dream. Or a good illustration of my feeling could be from Dostoevsky’s Idiot when Prince Myshkin sees for the first time the portrait of Nastasia Filippovna: “Where have I seen this face? Perhaps in my dream?” “A Little Napoleon looking into Eternity” — this was my spontaneous reaction. But I was not still aware it was me. I just recognised something hidden but existing in me — this Angst I had inherited with my Birth which I still deny and cover quite skillfully with my flamboyancy. This child has clairvoyant eyes — how could you depict this, Fionn? Here I think not just about your skill as an artist, I think about psychoanalysis. Yes, Luda is on the left. The little Brigitte Bardot who also looks into Eternity. Tragic? Yes, but life is tragic. Art turns the tragic into Beauty.

From Charles Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal:

Correspondances

La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers 

Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles; 

L’homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles 

Qui l’observent avec des regards familiers. 

Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent 

Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité, 

Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté, 

Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent. 

II est des parfums frais comme des chairs d’enfants, 

Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies, 

Et d’autres, corrompus, riches et triomphants, 

Ayant l’expansion des choses infinies, 

Comme l’ambre, le musc, le benjoin et l’encens, 

Qui chantent les transports de l’esprit et des sens.

Correspondences by Charles Baudelaire

Nature is a temple in which living pillars
Sometimes give voice to confused words;
Man passes there through forests of symbols
Which look at him with understanding eyes.

Like prolonged echoes mingling in the distance
In a deep and tenebrous unity,
Vast as the dark of night and as the light of day,
Perfumes, sounds, and colours correspond.

There are perfumes as cool as the flesh of children,
Sweet as oboes, green as meadows
— And others are corrupt, and rich, triumphant,

With power to expand into infinity,
Like amber and incense, musk, benzoin,
That sing the ecstasy of the soul and senses.

— translated by William Aggeler

Albina von Klix, June 2016

#portrait #children #painting #baudelaire #portraiture #poetry #albinavonklix