Month: October 2016

Edvard Munch and The Spanish Flu

~ Meg ~ 36 Comments

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Self Portrait, Spanish Influenza
Mr. Cake (cakeordeathsite) has graciously agreed to share another of his wonderful art posts with me. In reading about the flu epidemic, I learned that the artist, Edvard Munch, was a victim. This was once again a nugget of information perfectly suited to his expertise. 

At beginning of 1919, the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (see Madonna) who painted one of the most famous paintings of all time, 1893’s The Scream, became seriously ill with the Spanish Influenza that had already claimed the lives of millions across the world.

Munch painted hundreds of self-portraits throughout his career, most notable are Self-Portrait with Burning Cigarette from 1895

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Self Portrait With a Burning Cigarette
and 1903’s startling Self-Portrait in Hell.

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Self Portrait In Hell
Munch’s art which encompassed Symbolism and paved the way for Expressionism, brought a new and unprecedented focus on subjectivity and psychological states, naturally found raw material in the unflinching and dramatic presentation of the diseased and tormented self.

Self-Portrait, Spanish Influenza, featured at the top, though of a later period, is no exception in its neurotic intensity. The jarring colours are suggestive of sickness and trauma and Munch’s sallow mask-like face seems to be staring straight at death.

Munch would survive the Spanish Influenza, dying in 1944 at the age of 80. His paintings and prints retain an evocative urgency in their depiction of the universal states of anguish, illness, sexual anxiety and dissolution of the body.

 

Listen, fool…

~ Meg ~ 32 Comments

“The first and most important requirement is an understanding of human nature. … A man learns nothing when he talks; he learns by listening. Which is why those who talk the most are, in the ordinary run of things, fools.” – Essay on Novels, The Marquis de Sade

More writing advice from the esteemed (alright, notorious and dubious) Marquis de Sade. He is onto something, however.

Writers need to be students. Students of all that life has to inform us. I am a firm believer in reading, observing, listening and contemplating (possibly to a fault – I do drift off sometimes into my own private world of wonder). How else can a writer put him or herself into the mind of a character –a character who does not share your own life’s experience, beliefs, opinions, motivations, desires or biases?

Ask the why and the what for? What motivates people to do the things they do? Is it a lust for power, wealth, fame? Or duty, honor and family obligation?  Or most nobly, for love?

Observe people talking to their partners across the table at a restaurant. What do you gather from their facial expressions? Is it a romantic evening or is tension in the air? What can you gather by listening to the person next to you on the train as they talk on the phone? Is it business, a family matter, personal? (I am not advocating stalking, FYI!)

Just like traveling to the location we wish to use as our setting so as not to get it wrong, the characters we write also need to be authentic. And thus as we listen and observe, we then become empaths, placing ourselves in the situations we wish to write about.

And in the spirit of the above advice, I will stop talking and let the marquis’ words stand on their own.

Image thanks to NPR