Interiors and Exteriors

The power of elements play a significant role in forging interiors and exteriors.  On the outside, those forces of weather ( air, fire, earth, water)  shape a landscape's character as well as those of each season. On the inside, it's the crafted materials of wood, stone and glass that create the atmosphere of a house and its rooms. But the human condition is influenced and defined by both. Recently, the museum coordinator/ director Sabine Rewaldi ( of The Metropolitan Museum of Art) put together an exhibit  that features a collection of   paintings that present as their subject matter -- rooms with a view. The canvas  invites the reader into a quiet chamber with an open window glimpsing an  expansive scene of nature. One evoking thoughts of release and  mystery,  hills/sea/vistas stretching  beyond the discerning eye.  The view and the ability to view from a certain  point becomes the harmonic balance, the magic alchemy of these reflective paintings.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703937104576303451499820930

The one featured here caught my attention and inspired this poem called   A Room To View. I was drawn to this  woman grooming her hair before the mirror while part of her seems beckoned by the open window and its scenic contents. I wanted to show the two sides of  self, the woman laced in the stifling elegance of her corset and morning toilette, (the sameness of routine) as well as the  girl needing to become free and absorbed by the wind and storm cleansed atmosphere., the passionate release of Spring and her own artistic willfulness. In a way, it's the caged spirit set loose and diffusing into nature.

 

A Room To View

The open window is an echo of the canvas, and a threshold literally and symbolically—you are inside and yet long for something outside.......

                                           Sabine Rewaldi

I stand here

glancing at the mirror

and an open window.

 

In the glass, a woman

laced in whalebone, a rivulet

 of dark hair running

 through her hands  Her face pale,

malaised in the pallor

 of routine.

 

In the distance,  a girl

freed from the sculpted

continuum, her shadow clinging

 to a storm wind.

 

The black tree, the green field

washed in rain, the release

 of Spring's sudden coming.