'Waiting' with Hendrick Corneliz. van Vliet (1611-75)
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Step three—“Pictorial Gesture:” Are you prepared now to respond to the pictorial gesture of this painting that invites you into a place of extraordinary transformation of the most ordinary and urgent reality of your own existence? Close your eyes. Open them slowly. Breathe in ... Breathe out ... Be present .... Now, try to move beyond your initial meditation on the discrete components of form and content. Allow the physical painting, the object, to become an elusive but still-vivid “image” before you. Let it be, for the briefest of charged moments, a human subject you would encounter. Accept it, if you can and will, as Hendrick Corneliz. van Vliet's beckoning gesture to you. Let it “bridge” the infinite distance between you and him. Let it intimate wholeness. Let it be love.
As a physical painting, this “image,” as we have seen, is spatially open at its edges. Its obliqueness envelopes you. It de-objectifies and thereby closes the distance between you and itself. It offers itself as a subject comparable to you. Will you accept this occasion, for just a moment in its fullest unfamiliarity: allowing yourself to be vulnerable ...? Enter into the subtle, even magical, unreality of this “image” which is in no way a simply accurate rendering of the choir of the New Church at Delft from the northwest side. Since its purpose is intimation not imitation, it choreographs our perception; exaggerates it; shapes it; constructs it; transforms it. Can you begin to respond to this gesture? Can you begin to measure your own presence in relation to it? Keep looking ... breathing ... in ...out ... Imagine upward “movement” along the vertical edges of the painting ... follow the columns into the ascending illusory space ... accept both their structural bulk and weight and the contradictory release of the airy vaults. Imagine “movement” to the left ... to the right ... and into the center ... from near ... to ... far ...
In pictorial fact, you have been drawn into multiple views of this site. No ordinary perception can do what Hendrick van Vliet has done here. Although many photographs do record this site, neither they nor the human eye can see what you see now. The artist has joined together an array of discrete, even contradictory, optical moments as though they were all occurring at once. This “pictorial gesture” reunites discontinuous perceptions in an apparently seamless whole of subjective “interiority,” within which we might now find ourselves poised with him ... “Waiting.”
Once again, we could well stop here. We sensed this inchoate “interiority” from the start. We are now more or less aware of the constituent parts that compose this painting: its form, iconography and historical context. And, we have come slowly to this threshold of temporal “Waiting” in the “pictorial gesture” engineered by Hendrick van Vliet to engage us in an imagined experience of this place and this charged moment. Isn't this quite enough, at least for one class? Yes, it is, unless “Beholding” remains our true goal. For this painting to offer us an occasion of “Beholding,” we must now push one step further, beyond both detailed factual preparation and careful pictorial meditation to deliberate, practiced and disciplined contemplation. We must try to share a fragile and fleeting moment of “contemplative knowing,” however unfamiliar it may be, with Hendrick van Vliet: a moment of truest “Waiting.” But for what? And from where?
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