Winter Gold

Léon Spilliaert "Trees In A Winter Landscape" 1929

Through insomniac moonlit walks of his hometown of Ostend, Spilliaert’s philosophical preoccupations would be transformed into ghostly visions. Scenes of an enigmatic, twilight netherworld dramatically depicted Spilliaert’s psyche. His inner world is revealed via landscapes, objects and figures, compellingly sculpted towards abstraction.

In this period Spilliaert’s palette ranged from silver to grey to the inkiest, blackest of blacks. His paintings are haunting, lonely - sometimes terrifying - but they also exude something else; a quiet, sublime power, a transcendence. His isolated female figures achieve a nobility. His empty vistas an elegiac beauty. The layer after layer of India ink he uses to create the deepest darkness means that the spare, otherworldly light has a profound effect. The pitch black is pierced by distant glows or thin shafts of light. His paintings shine, becoming meditative and strangely uplifting. They are not paintings of a defeated mind, but of one embracing the challenge of finding beauty and light.

In Spilliaert’s later tree paintings, including this Winter Gold image, we still see the outer world sculpted to express the inner world, but the effect is more subtle and naturalistic. Spilliaert has perhaps found more beauty and more wisdom. The scenes are less distorted by the ferocious emotions, preoccupations and psychological currents of his early work. The dark and light are more balanced, as in Winter Gold's writer's words, the clouds may float into his life 'no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add colour to my sunset sky'.

These more subtle, naturalistic paintings retain the peculiar power that defines Spilliaert’s work. Their moods are complex and quietly gripping. They are subtly stylized, slipping into your mind and lodging there with a steady, silent glow. In Winter Gold’s painting the sky and the ground become one in a peach luminescence. Delicate, intensely intricate, silhouetted branches reach from swathes of receded snow. They look like the circulatory system, or neural pathways. The finest branches meld with the clouds, once again connecting the earthly  to a sky whose transcendence is borne from their presence.

Rabindranath Tagore "Stray Birds" 1916

“Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add colour to my sunset sky.”

Stray Birds is a book of poetry by Rabindranath Tagore's. It comprises three hundred and twenty six short verses of which Winter Gold’s words are one. With elegance and wisdom these snippets embody Tragore’s love of nature and simplicity, resonating deeply on truths of being, love and the marvels of the universe. 

Rabindranath Tagore was a Bengali Indian writer, poet, playwright, philosopher, composer, social reformer and painter. He transformed Bengali art by rejecting rigid traditional forms and linguistic structures.

In 1913 Tagore was the first non-European to receive a Nobel Prize in Literature He crossed continents on lecture tours, becoming the voice of India’s spiritual heritage - a living institution. The wisdom, balance and beauty Spilliaert achieves with his late artwork on Winter Gold finds a fitting frame with these words from the remarkable mind of Rabindranath Tagore.

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