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Forget-me-nots are small flowers with blue petals and long green stalks that tend to pop up on the side of pavements and in countryside meadows around April and May. I have always pondered their strange name without such they would cease to be very memorable at all. They are, for any better want of the word pretty ordinary.
During the mid-1600s, in the city of Delft, an innkeeper named Johannes Vermeer was changing the face of art dramatically. Did he paint graphic depictions of nudist women or portray the blunders of human nature in gory details? No. He painted women sewing lace and pouring milk; simple scenes of city life on overcast days; men painting women holding simple objects. This may sound extremely dull and unexciting, and to the untrained eye, it is. What was so revolutionary about Vermeer was that he painted very typical commonplace scenes. Where paint had previously been reserved for Kings, Saints, infamous battles and breath-taking views, Vermeer painted what people saw every day.
Arguably one of his most famous pieces, The Girl with The Pearl Earring, is a celebration of what is ordinary. The woman depicted is not a celebrity; she is not exceptionally wealthy or significantly poor; she is pretty, yes, but not in a particularly unique way; she is just another middle-class Dutch woman being herself. If he had not painted her, she would have been lost to the passage of time, no history books would have remembered her.
So, why did he paint her?
Humans are obsessed with being significant and being a somebody. People want to be remembered instead of forgotten. Vermeer, on the other hand, is almost telling us that people of significance are worse off than us common folk. Michel de Montaigne, writing around the same time as Vermeer, wrote that whilst “storming a breach, conducting an embassy” and “ruling a nation are glittering deeds” those left “rebuking, laughing, buying, selling, loving, hating and living together” are doing “something more remarkable, more rare and more difficult.”
Everyone, from adverts to education systems to our parents, tells us that success is achieved when we stand out and are exceptional. This dismisses the great joy and wonder that can be found in living the most basic and normal of lives. Being like everyone else is a deep-rooted fear most some, but Vermeer suggests that this is something we should be striving for.
This pandemic has moved our focus away from lauding the Kardashians of this world to cheering on the people who we shop next to and wave at from our houses: the doctors, the care workers, the shop workers. We live side by side with these people who are doing their everyday jobs. Now we have learnt to appreciate them more fully, seeing them as spectacular in themselves.
A fellow artist on a similar trajectory of thinking was Henri Matisse. Painting around two centuries after, Matisse centred his artwork around familiar objects and sights but with a slightly different tone, focussing on more cheerful and joyous scenes.
Matisse was painting at a time of great struggle and hardship. One of his greatest works, The Window, depicts the beautiful scene of a bowl of lavender next to an open window. This was created at the peak of the ongoing and horrific Battle of The Somme. Painting in his house in Paris one could consider Matisse as a very out of touch and insensitive person for ignoring the destruction occurring just a few miles from him. This evaluation could not be further from the truth. Matisse points us to the delicate pattern of the floorboards, the floating curtains in the gentle Spring breeze, the vivid green of the lush grass. It is not that he does not care about the bloodshed and vices all around him and is purposely choosing to dismiss them. Rather, he is warning us of the greatest darkness that can be found in this world: a lack of hope. He did not want his paintings to be a distraction, or act as an elude but to serve as a reminder. We can be so easily bogged down by focusing on all the bad things the world has to offer that we become pessimists and self-destructive. The Window does not depict a particularly marvellous or unique vision of joy. Most individuals will have seen something similar during their lives. That is the beauty of it.
In our day and age art may be perceived as something that is inaccessible and reserved only for the pretentious elite. People are often put off from turning to art for consolation because they fear that they will interpret it ‘wrongly’ somehow. It feels to people as if there is a barrier of knowledge present that blocks them from being able to truly understand and appreciate a piece of art.
Anyone can look at a piece of art without knowing any details about it and still decide for themselves how they feel, no one has any right to say that the emotions it may invoke in them are in some way wrong. Art is becoming more accessible and connotations surrounding it being pretentious and out of bounds to common people are being challenged, particularly as most individuals living in urban areas come across it daily in the form of graffiti.
Art, like music, has great therapeutic value. By looking at art, it can draw out buried emotions in a healthy way, acting as an antenna to focus on these feelings. Just as we can sit in our rooms and cry over a piece by Debussy or XXXTenacion and smile with glee to Dolly Parton or DJ Snake, so too can we look at pieces created by the likes of Vermeer and Matisse and find comfort there. With the development of technology it is easier than ever to access all kinds of art from the comfort of your sofa. For instance, Google Arts and Culture display and discuss a smorgasbord of different mediums of artistic expression.
What may worry people is that art could become a distraction from reality, that it may result in people perceiving the world as one that is filled exclusively with great joy and serenity, when it is not. Nevertheless, we are not deceiving ourselves when looking at such art. Instinctively, humans have a tendency to focus on what is wrong, this is how our ancestors survived. Nowadays, this way of thinking is extremely harmful. We must not forget and be naïve to the great horrors of this world, yes. Similarly, however, we must not forget the great bliss that can be found in even the most unlikely of places. In times like these where people have gone through, and continue to go through, terrible ordeals and painstaking troubles, this reminder is one of the most important of all.
As the debate begins on whether galleries should be re-opened as lockdown starts to ease, many unlikely individuals may find themselves flocking to some of our greatest artistic institutions in the coming months and finding refuge there. Nonetheless, if art fails to pique your interest at all then the lesson preached by the likes of Vermeer and Matisse can still be of great benefit to you. It is the notion that it is okay to be normal and that this way of life may be something that we should be celebrating, rather than being afraid of. Their art also reminds us that hope and joy can be found anywhere, especially within elements of our seemingly ordinary lives: a simple meal with loved ones; a dog chasing a ball in a park; a forget-me-not on the side of the road.
By Marnie Ashbridge.
Some pictures of roadside flowers.
Of the week…
Listening to: Ron Sexsmith’s ‘Gold In Them Hills’
Looking at: Henri Matisse, Andy Warhol (the cover picture on the home page: “Campbell’s Soup Cans) and Johannes Vermeer: all can be found on the Google Arts and Culture site. Forget-me-nots: just because something is ordinary and we can come across it everyday does not mean it is not spectacular.
Reading: Bernard Crick’s Essays on Citizenship (Montaigne’s quote can be found on page 148)
Watching: About Time, a delightful film about the joys of ordinary life.
The Quarantine Times 