'Waiting' with Hendrick Corneliz. van Vliet (1611-75)
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To move closer to an occasion of “Beholding,” you will need to soften you eyes ... soften your analytical, inquiring, instrumental, critical and grasping mind and body. Allow yourself to engage this painting that the man, Hendrick van Vliet, the artist, the fellow human being like you, constructed for you to contemplate. Be still ... Breathe mindfully ... quietly ... Be present within the thrall of this painting and its “image.” Try to experience directly, for yourself, its formal and iconographic intersections ... its pictorial contradictions. See if you can come to embrace them and their “pictorial gesture” to you, as though this painting were the only illumination in this room ... and you were here alone with it .…
Detail of coats-of-arms
Contemplate: the deliberately non-Catholic, Protestant imagery; the coats-of-arms of civil virtue and status, secular rather than ecclesiastical honor ... individual and social reverence ...
Detail of grave digger
Contemplate: the self-consciously casual, nonecclesiastical figures, including this grave digger (a common activity in Dutch churches, frequently included in paintings of church interiors), who seems to have been interrupted by something, turning his head as though listening…
Contemplate: the randomly placed boards that seem almost to de-construct unconsciously the “Cross,” evoking a cultural and artistic non-Catholic, Protestant presence ...
Detail of mother and child
Contemplate: an ordinary mother and child who are pointedly not Mary and the Christ, but are nonetheless sacral as embodied human beings ...
Contemplate: personal, idiosyncratic and random behavior within the expected context of orthodox ritual ...
Detail of man, woman and dog
Detail of man at the distant door
Contemplate: passage through the threshold of this space ... of coming and going ... of exterior ... interior ...
Detail of tomb
Contemplate: the re-imagined Catholic altar as an exemplary tomb, not of the Christ (as all Catholic altars are), but of a hero of civic pride, honor, loyalty ... local habitation ... subordinated here to the periphery of the painting ...
Detail of reflected light
Contemplate: reflected light on high walls ... ambient light in the half-hidden vaults ...
Detail of clerestory light
Contemplate: light piercing transparent clerestory windows ... transition ... threshold ... transformation
Detail of light on the church floor
Contemplate: light descending from the clerestory ... illuminating the stone floor
Detail of column
Contemplate: the range of values (variations of light and dark) that compose three-dimensional form ...
Overall without frame
Contemplate: neutral color values that contrast distinctly with discrete fragments of full chroma color and yet combine in the luminous form of objects and the space they occupy ... the complex array of these neutral and full-intensity color values as the embodiment of the illusory space of this church interior and the surface of the painting...
Contemplate: the general choreography of values throughout the painting, especially the luminous crescendo, culminating in the “lightest light” in the painting on the right side of the central column...
Try to bring all of these individual visual contemplative “notes” together in your perception of the painting. Let the “image” hold these discontinuous, random and changeable fragments before you, not as a discrete simulacrum or even a rough imitation of the interior of the New Church at Delft, but as a finite and discontinuous fraction of an infinite whole beyond your normal perception. Let your contemplation suspend this “image” for you in all of its singularity and integration. Let this intimated wholeness embrace you as you embrace the contradiction of division and connection; self-conscious separation and longing...
Continued >>
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