“I wonder if the song of the ink beneath our paint can still be heard.” A life struggle and journey framed against an ambitious restoration of a Wassily Kandinsky print…
by: Evelyn Byrne
When my parents separated, the first non-practical thing bought for our new home was a print of the 1936 Wassily Kandinsky work Dominant Curve. Painted towards the end of Kandinsky’s life, it is a vivid landscape of abstract shapes that expand across the canvas. The piece has a sense of distance using a wide sweeping curve to split it into parts with the sharp lines of the foreground contrasting distant, more organic, forms. Initially bought to cover up a patch of unpainted wall left by the previous owner, it was still covering the same spot when I came home from university early with a diagnosis of anorexia.
Sitting centrally in the room, your eyes are drawn instinctively towards the print, and I have spent many hours losing myself within it. As a child, I remember being captivated by its bolder elements and, like being faced with a scattering of clouds against a blue sky, I pieced together stories. Almost disconcerted by the abstract, I responded to the discomfort by eagerly attributing meaning to the forms. Looking at the painting now I am much more focused on the background, finding myself contemplating the tones and color pallete of the piece. I am, at last, noticing the way that the softly dispersed colors remind me of the glow of sunlight. At some point my perspective shifted and the artwork became transformed.
While I believed the print to be a constant in my transition from child to adult, unnoticed it had changed too. Comparing the piece that I returned home to with images online you are struck by how faded the colors had become, adopting a shade of blue. Were my recent observations in fact formed on an inaccurate image? The deterioration of the ink pigments was due to the effect of light over time — all the sunshine of a childhood. It happened at a gradual enough pace that the change went unnoticed until we stopped to consider the way things were meant to be. As I embarked on my recovery journey I began to acknowledge the similarity to my own descent into illness.
Looking at the piece, even in its faded form, you can see the ways that Kandinsky was heavily influenced by color. In his lifetime he produced several important theoretical works on color theory believing that it was the most effective way to express emotion, writing “generally speaking, color directly influences the soul.” We often associate blue with melancholy, but he seemed to take a different perspective. In Concerning he Spiritual in Art he wrote “…the deeper the blue the more it beckons man into the infinite, arousing a longing for purity and the super sensuous. It is the color of the heavens just as we imagine it, when we hear the word heaven. Blue is the typical heavenly color.” Climbing out of the bottom left corner, in Dominant Curve, you can see a staircase with no destination. Looking closer you notice that the top stair is covered by a flower of blue — your eyes are being drawn into the heavens.
Kandinsky had a form of synaesthesia where music and color were intertwined. If we could capture his song of blue I think Rebecca Solnit would hear the same tune. She writes, “Blue is the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in, for the blue world,” and what is more unreachable than the perfection of the heavens? In her essay “The Blue of Distance” this blue represents a yearning for the unattainable, the horizon you will never reach. “The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost.” Solnit explores aspects of loss and longing, and her writing makes me wonder if the distance between a place as it is now and the memories of it that you are unable to return to is a similar shade. Perhaps the original colors of our childhood have been lost.
Author, screenwriter, and producer Gillian Flynn writes, “They always call depression the blues, but I would have been happy to waken to a periwinkle outlook. Depression to me is urine yellow, washed out, exhausted.” Perhaps it is not that blue represents sadness so much as the longing that it captures can so easily become insidious. In fact, on yellow Kandinsky states, “When made colder with blue it takes on…a sickly hue.” As my anorexia worsened, I was constantly trying to reach some warped version of perfection, unable to recognise it as the blue point on the edge of the horizon, the goal unreachable.
One evening shortly after I returned home, we did the radical: unhung the print and painstakingly separated it from its frame. A difficult and delicate first step, I think both my mum and I were as cautious with this as we were with my tentative steps towards recovery. We then unfolded our table and dug out our paints from the garage. After agreeing on a reference image online we began to paint over each element to return it to its original color, planning to transform our faded print back to the piece Kandinsky intended. To start with we didn’t have the right tools, stumbling along using dried out paints and paintbrushes that left trails of hair.
Despite this, at the beginning of our project, we worked regularly and made quick progress. The yellows and oranges that had become muted and sickly suddenly returned to vibrancy and color was spreading across the artwork. It was a relief to immerse myself within the task, to be able to see concrete progress while my own journey remained intangible. As we worked I began to realize that we were in fact creating many pieces, each addition of paint formed a new artwork — the restoration a constant process of becoming.
Then, weeks at home turned into months and the painting stagnated. Our lives had narrowed down to nothing but the food that I would or wouldn’t eat and we had stopped making time to work on Dominant Curve, too tired from days of conflict to focus on the fine details. I began to find myself looking at the painting as it sat on the table, unchanging and half completed and wondered whether we’d ever finish it or if it would have been better just left up on the wall slowly turning blue, not stuck in this hodge podge of states.
Since falling ill, I have struggled to picture a future after recovery. It hasn’t truly sunk in that I am always going to be someone who has struggled with anorexia. That even when I am well I will still have lost this time. I am never going to have not had this experience. It’s strange because I don’t know the well version of myself that I will become. I think that while I’m recovering instead of recovered, I can justify the losses I’ve been through, but I know there will be so much to grieve. I think I’m scared of having to feel that. I wonder if the song of the ink beneath our paint can still be heard.
It’s a strangely intimate process, attempting to recreate the work of an artist the way we did. In producing an artist’s copy there is a detachment, your own hands slowly reproducing a piece of art. What we were doing was messier than that, it wasn’t Kandinsky and then our separate recreation, the two were entangled, his work being left behind underneath ours, areas of gloss where the colors hadn’t been too affected and could be left exposed. There were points where my work and my mum’s intertwined and suddenly one colour became two — our perception of the work not quite aligned.
I feel privileged to have become so familiar with this piece, I know the ways Kandinsky mixed paint on the canvas, know the areas that appear to have been painted over or corrected. It is full of spontaneity and imperfections, and this allows Kandinsky to capture a fluidity. To reproduce the piece correctly we needed to go beyond just painting over the forms — areas needed to be submerged beneath a swathe of paint before we could once again reveal the finer details, as if for the first time. The process wasn’t linear and the liveliness of the piece led to a dilemma: if we are recreating it do we replicate the appearance or the experience? When he had appeared to blend paint on the canvas do we try to repeat the same marks or embrace our own?
For months the project remained incomplete, our questions unanswered. Time was rapidly passing, yet I failed to find a way forward in my recovery. I was stuck staring in two directions, both of which felt equally hazed in blue. In his essay “Limbo,” writer, filmmaker, and musician Dan Fox explores this landscape, when travelling out to sea it is only once you have moved so far that your direction becomes unchangeable — “This you realize is your starting point now. A full recalibration is needed.” I knew I needed to pick a direction, and it was only when I made the decision to go inpatient that progress on the painting began again, determined to finish before my admission.
There was something compulsive about this completion — I felt unable to recover until the job was done. In fact, I genuinely believed that finishing the painting would be the key to my recovery, overlooking all the work and time that healing requires. In the upper left corner of the piece there is dark rectangle containing organic forms which many interpret as a sort of key or legend. This was the final area we repainted and the transition to the striking dark felt a fitting end to our restoration. Since falling ill, I have felt lost within an unrecognizable landscape and while finishing the painting was not a cure to my illness, the decisions wrapped around it were the first steps towards developing my own compass.
Going inpatient has been the hardest period of my life so far and the process has not been smooth sailing. I spent a long time fighting against treatment — the knowledge that I needed and wanted things to change was not enough to conquer the illness. It was through slow, hard work and the support of the ward that the blue haze began to lift. As I moved away from engaging with anorexia, a more vibrant version of myself returned. Although I had been in recovery from anorexia for over a year, it was only then that I felt I had found the right path.
It’s a daunting process leaving behind the familiarity of illness, and I still feel apprehensive about who I will be at the end of all this, but having now reached a point where I am able to spend the weekends at home, I feel grateful for all the work my past self has done. In Otherlands, British palaeobiologist and author Thomas Halliday writes, “Recovery cannot replace what is lost,” and having reframed and rehung our own Dominant Curve, I am learning to accept the areas where our recreation is imperfect. It is clear to me that despite being in the same spot, the painting is a different piece of art to the one that my mum bought for £4 from a tip shop in 2010. Nonetheless I think the melody of our new piece has just as much potential for joy.
Evelyn Byrne is a creative and environmentalist who has performed her work at the Birmingham Hippodrome, across Warwickshire and even in a mountain-top lake. A former Poetry Society Young Critic, her writing explores the intersections of art, technology and nature, as well as her lived experience with anorexia.
