Anam Cara

Vermeer is the master in evoking interior spaces. In The Soldier with a Laughing Girl, a soldier with his back to us is seated at a table with a girl who faces him and us. From an open window light comes in. Vermeer achieves great depth through the technique of single point perspective. He makes the Cavalier’s figure larger so that the girl becomes more diminutive and thus seems further away from us. The officer has a long red coat which is radiant in the light. His huge hat with its shadow almost completely hides his face from us. The girl’s face and upper body take the brunt of the light. Her mouth is open, her face is intent and interested, her head is covered with a white scarf. The light through the window is what confers reality on the scene. The exquisite modulation of the light evokes the mood and the depth of the skin tone. The transmutation of light is the key to Vermeer. The quality of the light is the signature of the drama. The slow, attentive light fills the space between the two figures and sustains their gazing, yet it leaves the surround of their figures and the rest of the scene suffused with shadow. Light precedes object in Vermeer; it is as though it is the light itself that is imagining the scene within the painting. This patient light evokes the invisible interiors concealed in the minds and hearts of the Cavalier and the girl. It bestows a remarkable calm on what is most probably a seduction scene. There is dignity, longing and the sustained Eros of approach and approaching delight. Through the careful delicacy of composition and the immaculate restraint of mood, Vermeer is almost able to render the introverted world explicit. He holds the tension of that threshold between image and silence in perfect balance.

Vermeer’s work attracts us because we feel drawn into the point of the intimacy where an event is secretly building towards its own definition or disclosure. His contemplative attention is able to imagine and compose a scene which becomes cumulatively deeper, the deeper you gaze into it. These are scenes of carefully selected and distilled presence. Vermeer is a master at suggesting the quiet depths that dwell behind appearance. He evokes them as they are about to stir towards the surface. The masterly stillness is achieved through his uncanny ability to render such depths of emotion with refined transparency. His simplicity is mystery rendered lyrical. In a loud and garish neon time, the quietude of his work draws our eyes into a subtle rhythm of gazing where we might come to glimpse the structures of quiet depths. His reticence is more vocal than any statement or description. Each scene is created with a grace of proportion and sureness of measure. We are shown just enough to imagine everything else. In Vermeer all the secrets are held inside the weight of stillness.

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Sound and gesture are contemporary, identical and

indistinguishable . . . Linked to its own past, the gesture fills up

with music and becomes rounded, like the universe . . . The

beauty of gesture renders time visible.

CATHERINE DAVID

STILLNESS IS THE CANVAS AGAINST WHICH MOVEMENT CAN become beautiful. We can only appreciate movement against the background of stillness. Were everything kinetic, we could not know what movement is. As sound is sistered to silence, movement is sistered to stillness.

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IT IS LOVELY TO SIT ON THE RIM OF A RISING VALLEY AND WATCH along its depth-line the grace of a river’s journey. The long flow of its water traverses each field at the same time but with an ever new continuity. The river unfolds equally all along the one line of its one journey. From source to sea it is one flow; nowhere does it pile up. Nowhere does the water break to leave an empty space. From source to sea, it is one unbroken song of flow – ever changing yet always one. The grace of a river is a reminder of how nature seeks elegance and achieves immense beauty of cohesion and balance. A river blends music of movement with an enduring and accompanying depth of stillness. Again its journey is always out of silence, and this silence dwells deep in the river too. If only our lives could achieve, or indeed allow, such grace and elegance. If we could but find a rhythm of being which could balance a contemplative grace, a poetry of motion and an accompanying stillness and silence, our pilgrimage through this world would flow in beauty through the most ragged and forsaken heartlands of confusion and dishevelment. It would continue to hold a clear flow-line between the memory and depth of the earth and the eternal fluency of the ocean and never lose the passion of flowing towards the ever new promise of the future.