I Don't Get It
- Paulie
- Jul 29, 2023
- 6 min read
Mom pick me up I'm scared.
Hi hotties! I’m back from a trip to Barcelona with my partner Mia. We had a great time, bringing back plenty of lovely memories, a nice fridge magnet and postcards, some vegan Baileys cream and tenth degree sunburn on my shoulders, arms and back!
Having shed my former self over the past week, I’m back to talk about uhhhh, this. I have written this intro a few times and not really sure what this letter is actually about, if I had to attribute it to a “theme”. The first two sections are a bit bleak and then we go silly mode again so just take your pick baby.
Content warning for: Death, bodily harm, blood, sexual assault
Others consist of beliefs, I consist of doubts
Polish artist, photographer and sculptor Zdzisław Beksiński (1929-2005) was a creative who refused definition. He rebuked the idea his paintings represented dreamscapes, rejected symbolic meaning, rejected influence or inspiration of any kind. If we were to believe Beksiński, paintings such as the one above, were produced in a sort of plasmic id, a dark centre that responded only to mood, current emotion, an undecipherable internal sense of direction that Beksiński himself did not fully understand, whether he wanted to or not. “There is a certain range of moods I like. Nothing else”.
Beksiński has been called a dystopian surrealist - though he rejects having anything in common with surrealist artists - he has been compared to himself and his former paintings - though he is embarrassed to be associated with any former version of himself, stating “it would be terrible if my opinions were preserved somewhere”. He has rejected the notion of being able to teach anyone anything: “others consist of beliefs, I consist of doubts”. So what to make of this mysterious, deliberately opaque man?
Born in 1929, the artist came of age during the Nazi occupation of Poland during World War Two. By the cultural boom of the 1960s, he was already in his thirties - engaged by the aesthetics and polemics of the times but not as malleable to the radical changes envisioned as his peers. By the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 - a point which Beksiński claims was a period of heightened, albeit short-lived political interest for the artist - the man was approaching old age. The fall of the Soviet Union was not a new dawn for Beksiński, but a sunset.
