Dreaming of Illiers-Combray

This looks like a simple painting, but it was difficult to do.  I painted it quickly, but I had to dream about it before applying any paint.  What's an Illiers-Combray?  The painting is a view of the intersection of Rue Saint-Hilaire and Rue des Trois Maries in the small town of Illiers-Combray.  The tree seen in the back at right is in the garden of Aunt Leonie's house.  Young Marcel's family would exit the gate here to walk the "Guermantes Way."  The town of Illiers added Proust's fictional name for the town "Combray" in 1971 hoping to attract tourists who wanted to search for lost time.

A Happening Still Life and Elstir

The above is a 9x12 oil on paper of the studio table, a view similar to the last pastel drawing.  I say 'similar' because when I start I work from one side and continue to the other side and let be what will be.  It's a happening.

I continue to progress to the end of Proust's The Guermantes Way, and encountered the famous passage, when our hero Marcel loses track of time in the Guermantes home while examining the Elstir paintings: "Among these pictures, some of those that seemed most absurd to people in fashionable society interested me more than the rest because they re-created those optical illusions which prove to us that we should never succeed in identifying objets if we did not bring some process of reasoning to bear on them.  How often, when driving, do we not come upon a bright street beginning a few feet away from us, when what we have actually before our eyes is merely a patch of wall glaringly lit which has given us the mirage of depth. This being the case, it is surely logical,  not from any artifice of symbolism but from a sincere desire to return to the very root of the impression, to represent that one thing by the other for which, in a flash of a first illusion, we mistook it.  Surfaces and volumes are in reality independent of the names of objects which our memory imposes on them after we have recognized them. Elstir sought to wrest from what he had just felt what he already knew; he had often been at pains to break up that medley of impressions which we call vision."  Looking at the world as patches of light and shade and color offers a different entryway to reality than seeing the world as a bunch of objects.

Another Bond and First with the First Encounter with Elstir

A 12x9 charcoal and pastel drawing of the corner of Bond and First in Brooklyn.

I have finally reached the encounter between Marcel and the famous painter Elstir.  Here's what Marcel writes about Elstir:

"Naturally enough, what he had in his studio were almost  all seascapes done here, at Balbec.  But I was able to discern from these that the charm of each of them lay in a sort of metamorphosis of the things represented in it, analogous to what in poetry we call metaphor, and that if God the Father had created things by naming them, it was by taking away their names or giving them other names that Elstir created them anew.  The names which denote things correspond invariably to an intellectual notion, alien to our true impressions, and compelling us to eliminate from them everything that is not in keeping with itself."

In a November 2, 2008 article in the N.Y. Times, Randy Kennedy wrote:

"Proust's character Elstir, a Zen-like Impressionist thought to be made up of pieces of Whistler, Monet, Gustave Moreau, Edouard Vuillard and others, is important not only in terms of plot...but in terms of ideas.
Elstir can come off at times as Proust's caricature of the beret-draped Romantic, rushing to the beach at night, naked model in tow, to capture a certain quality of moonlight.  But Elstir's artistic ideal, to perceive things innocently--or as Becket describes it, to represent 'what he sees, and not what he knows he ought to see'--is profound.  And it goes to the heart of one of Proust's main themes: that we are held prisoner by preconceptions, by habit and by the normal machinery of memory, which provides only a pale, distorted record of experiences."

Betty Edwards, in her Drawing from the Right Side of the Brain, has admirably exploited this "profound" ideal.

Bond and Union and What's Underneath

The car and the building, both stationary, appear to be going in opposite directions despite being located at Bond and Union in Brooklyn.  9x12 oil.

I am determined to read the entire A la recherche du temps perdu by Proust.  I did not finish the last time.  There's a passage in Swann's Way that has always impressed me, besides the 'madeleine' event.  While on the Guermantes Way, 'Marcel' says:  "...without definite attachment to anything, suddenly a roof, a gleam of sunlight reflected from a stone, the smell of the  road would make me stop still, to enjoy the special pleasure that each of them gave me, and also because they appeared to be concealing, beneath what my eyes could see, something which they invited me to approach and seize from them, but which, despite all my efforts, I never managed to discover.  As I felt that the mysterious object was to be found in them, I would stand there in front of them, motionless, gazing, breathing, endeavouring to penetrate with my mind beyond the thing seen or smelt.  And if I had then to hasten after my grandfather, to proceed on my way, I would still seek to recover my sense of them by closing my eyes;  I would concentrate upon recalling exactly the line of the roof, the colour of the stone, which, without my being able to understand why, had seemed to me to be teeming, ready to open, to yield up to me the secret treasure of which they were themselves no more than the outer coverings."