Rene Magritte Personal Values SoVA Assignment Part 2

Personalised Values, LeeSH, May 2012

I love the way the sketch looks so soft ~~ and the lines are so fine. I love mechanical pencils in that way.

Well doing what I do best in terms of art, and being most comfortable with this medium (having been drawing with pencil and paper for more than a decade (i sound so old) and in my toddler years very much disliking the crayons because they were so large and clumsy to my tiny untrained hands, thus having never ever touched them much again), I decided to do a pencil sketch...... (:

It's slightly smaller than A3 by the way. 375x278 mm. Some parts of the drawing got "chopped" off during their stay in the scanner. (The scanner because resolution on my camera is also way too high for an efficient upload.) Thank goodness I didn't do it on A3. But the essence is very well captured here so let's make do.

Like Magritte I have rendered some everyday objects realistically, scaling them to gargantuan sizes of different variations. Here's an introduction and some explanations.

I have depicted an imaginary room similar to Magritte's. However, the room is divided into two halves from the viewer's perspective by a huge book leaning against the wall. The half of the wall by which the bed sits is filled with stars and depicts a night sky, like a planetarium of a box. This carries dualistic implications. On one hand, this is a Surrealistic juxtaposition of morning and night, so the viewer is not clear which time of the day it is. Hence a comparison can be drawn between my sketch and another of Magritte's, Day and Night, where he painted a street night scene with the sky as daylight. A sense of disoriented calm is present in the painting, even as I sought to bring across the same atmosphere in mine.

Day and Night, Rene Magritte

On the other hand, this is like a statement on how nature always transits from one state to another. To support this visual statement, the order of the objects go in a circle. You can begin from one and carry on anti-clockwise or clockwise, but you will always end up where you started.  I realise that yet another connection can be drawn for this implication to Han Sai Por's sculpture Growth.

Han Sai Por, Growth

I read that Magritte, unlike most Surrealist artists, does not really attempt to bring across any deep underlying meaning in his artworks. Instead, he is more interested in the juxtaposition of unlikely objects. However, I relate to some things with feelings. Now let me explain the significance of these objects I have chosen which have 'value' to me.

Bottle. On a personal level, my want to depict this was derived from a fundamental need; I need water to drink. I have sketched out the water droplets clinging to the sides of the cylindrical bottle - aiming to capture the ephemeral essence and fragility of life. Thus there is a tension as the viewer knows the droplets might fall soon because of personal psychological expectations- yet it is only a lifeless piece of drawing. This is similar to the still tension I feel Magritte creates as he places his shaving brush precariously over the top of the armoire.

Bed. I must comment on this! Note the mussed up bed covers. First of all: If I am the owner of the room, of course the bed covers would be crumpled up because I would have to sleep on the bed. On a more serious note I understand that Magritte probably chose to leave the bed in his painting seemingly untouched to create an eerie feel; something that we expect to be there (such as crinkles on the bedsheet) is not there, providing an unnerving sense of loss in the viewer (my interpretation). For me, by right of personal choice (as it's Personalised Values), because it's supposed to be called Personal Values, I thought I should personalise it by making it more realistic in a larger sense of the word - as my usual artistic style is realistic. And realistically, the moment someone gets up from the bed he/she leaves behind some wrinkles on the bed sheets. This is to show the very existence of the anonymous owner of the room, which should be me, with only the wrinkles on the bed to allude to it.

Book. This represents the literature in my life. Right now, literature is almost non-existent in my life, pushed away to a sad secluded spot. But it used to be a really big thing for me. I would read every single day. Well, I still read everyday, but for 15 minutes etc. I really have no time for literature any more (to all avid readers: I highly recommend Yoko Ogawa's The Housekeeper and the Professor. It's in English. Of course. But the title doesn't sound very elegant or nice or whatever, but it's a timeless masterpiece, that) Thus this is an expression of sorts of a regret that something that took such a big part of my life has now inevitably been reduced in measure of importance. Note the size of my regret.

Photographs. They mean much more than printed pixels on a glossy rectangle. Looking at a childhood photograph can trigger warm nostalgia - emotions and memories all at one go, something that makes us human. I found this to be true as I saw some old photographs my sister was flipping through in her spare time back in May. Hence I drew my sister and I as children (not an accurate depiction; I made the scene up) in the photograph lying on the ground in the room. Happy memories are kind of what I feed on sometimes (not all the time, as we can't always dwell in the past), and I think childhood was naturally a happy period of my life.

Pen. Now this soundlessly expresses a thousand words to me, but I think for the viewer it might just look like a pen. For me it visually expresses my love for writing (another regret here; I haven't wrote for a long while.....) and for drawing all at one go. (Killing two birds with one stone.) But naturally it's impossible to weigh which one I like better on the Value scale, so I embodied them into one object.

Toothbrush. This addresses health. I was looking at the question: How much do we value our health? Not that I'm preaching or anything, but these are sincerely just my thoughts: When it's there we don't realise how fortunate we are because for most of us, much of the time we are healthy. Only when the sicknesses come along the way, we begin to appreciate health, and other people around us like friends and family. Recently I became ill the weekend before the start of Term 3 week 1. My head was burning at 38 degrees C and I was lying in discomfort thinking. As I thought, I began to come to terms with how health really is a blessing I take for granted because I am healthy much of the time; it's become so normal for me. I also heard an account recently of a woman who, upon learning she was stricken with terminal illness, began only then to cherish her friends and family, spending more time with them, etc.

Eraser. (You can't see it very well as half of it got cropped off, although I tried my best to have it included as far as possible.) As we walk along this stretch of life, it is expected that mistakes will be made in this world of imperfections. Small and big ones. Sometimes after committing a mistake we may feel regretful, upset, and hurt inside - and we wish more than anything that these mistakes could be washed away and forgotten. In those times we wonder if there is a way. This eraser expresses my hope that mistakes can be erased and forgotten. And in a way, it is like a cyclic process - you travel through the various points of life, you accumulate the mistakes and you reach the eraser; you reach a point where you realise that you need to unburden your load. And because life isn't a smooth ride, the circle of objects were not arranged in a perfect circle, but a distorted vague circle.