The human mind is not meant to be governed, certainly not by any book of rules yet written; it is supposed to run itself, and we are obliged to follow it along, trying to keep up with it as best we can.
— Lewis ThomasIn any act of thinking, the mind must reach across this space between known and unknown, linking one to the other but also keeping visible their difference. It is an erotic space.
— Anne CarsonImagine a woman in hot pursuit of an elusive idea, a woman stopped dead in her tracks in Amsterdam, seized unexpectedly by a painting:
The quality of the draughtsmanship, the brush strokes in thin oils, had a Renaissance beauty, but the fearful and compelling thing about the picture was its modernity. Here was a figure without a context, in its own context, a haunted woman in blue robes pulling a huge moon face through a subterranean waterway.
Jeanette Winterson wondered what she was to do as she stood transfixed in silent obedience to the painting’s call.
Shaken by her experience, Winterson fled to the comfort and safety of a nearby bookshop, seeking shelter in familiar things. She had intended to leave Amsterdam the next day but extended her stay to visit the city’s museums, where she found two things of note as she faced her own anxiety: ‘The paintings were perfectly at ease. I had fallen in love and I had no language. I was dog-dumb.’
From selected books about visual art, Winterson hoped to acquire a language that would not only allow her to reason with herself about the power of the arresting image and her personal reaction to it but would also give her a way to think about the image itself, the painting as painting. She had fallen into the gap between knowing and not knowing, but instead of walking away in frustration, she persevered.
Later, Winterson wrote a book grounded in this experience – a book not just about paintings but about art in general and our personal relationship to it. Art Objects reveals how we can think of objects such as books, paintings, essays and novels.
