Silent Line

Léon Spilliaert "La Princess Maleine" 1910

Spilliaert’s strange, spooky paintings arrest in a unique way. They hit you simultaneously like a gale force wind and a frozen alien calm. Elegiac, lonely, terrifying & beautiful, this Belgian genius expresses interior life that exists somewhere outside of time and place.

Our image comes from an edition of a play Spilliaert illustrated named 'La Princess Maleine'. Its writer, Maurice Maeterlinck, was a huge influence on Spilliart. His plays display the same suspended 'out of time' qualities of Spilliaert’s paintings. They also focus on the power and richness of the inner world in opposition to external action - something Spilliaert vividly achieves in manipulating worldly scenes into his abstracted phantasmagorical visions. 

The figures in Spilliaert’s paintings are nearly always stationary, faceless or turned away within scenery veering towards abstraction. Detail is shorn away and outward emotion removed, supplanted by lurching perspectives and strange coloured seas or faces sculpted into weird, mesmeric patterns. He creates a pregnant stillness, whilst we feel a hurricane of emotion lying just beneath. 

Spilliaert’s paintings are ghostly, haunting & lonely. His focus on mostly depicting women in limbo, stuck, isolated & dependent, chimes with his strong support for the women’s emancipation movement. But he also imbues his women with nobility & strength. His paintings are otherworldly, scary but also sublime. There is possession & power - something uplifting, even, in that strange, howling stillness. What he expresses, he sanctifies, both the light & the mysterious dark. His paintings connect us with that wide, timeless, living place of the interior, the place this ART WRD - Silent Line - was created to honour.

Rainer Maria Rilke from "The Book Of Hours" 1899

"I love the dark hours of my being.

My mind deepens into them.

There I can find, as in old letters,

the days of my life, already lived,

and held like a legend, and understood."

Rilke is recognized as one of the most lyrically intense poets to have ever lived. His poetry expresses his unique philosophy which developed to reconcile beauty & suffering, life & death. Not unlike Spilliaert, Rilke's work takes in the full scope of the world's dark side, regarding it as valid, universal & celebrating it as part of the whole.

Novelist Herman Hesse said of Rilke ‘through him resounds the music of the universe; like the basin of a fountain he becomes at once instrument and ear'. Silent Line's words are the first verse of a poem from The Book Of Hours. They honour the power of contemplation, the sanctity of reaching inwards to memory & thought - & the understanding it brings. 

As it develops the poem claims this is a path to ‘another life that is wide and timeless’.

Here it is in its sublime entirety:

I love the dark hours of my being.

My mind deepens into them.

There I can find, as in old letters,

the days of my life, already lived,

and held like a legend, and understood.

Then the knowing comes: I can open

to another life that’s wide and timeless.

So I am sometimes like a tree

rustling over a gravesite

and making real the dream

of the one its living roots

embrace:

a dream once lost

among sorrows and songs.

You can discover more and join Silent Line’s Exploration Archive.

Details

Perfect for city days and country aways.

⦁ Double handle poppers for security 

⦁ Large, easy-access internal drop-pocket 

⦁ Exploration label shows art and words info 

⦁ Comes in a reusable cotton bag

⦁ Vegan   

Dimensions: 34 x 43 x 9cm 

Handle drop: 30cm

People and planet positive

We do it properly, respectfully.

⦁ We use recycled nylon for stitch and bond strength. The rest is plastic-free.

⦁ Everyone is paid properly for their skill and expertise.

⦁ Our fabric comes via a leading ethical purchasing police

Our pioneering printing lasts a lifetime

We work with printing pioneers in England. They are able to recreate artworks on novel materials with unparalleled colour vibrancy, image quality and colour durability.

Our bags are crafted by highly skilled, passionate people

Our tote bags are handcrafted in Melton Mowbray, England, in small batches using traditional methods. This, along with the natural variation in these artisan products, means each one is unique.

Each bag is triple-stitched at pressure points. Combined with our triple-bonded shower proof twill, the result is a bag that is immensely strong and durable.