I look, I know, maybe I feel

It’s not true that emotions are simply there for the taking.

Shock may well be a common feeling. So may disgust. A man baked in an oven out of revenge, laid out on a huge dish, well done and crispy, with a garnish of colourful vegetables, as seen at the end of one of Peter Greenaway’s movies.

Something classical, such as ornamental wallpaper with a traditional English design, may elicit a pleasurable sensation in most viewers at a first glance. That’s not to be confused, though, with the fact that I may be fond of a given wallpaper design because up there, on the delightful flurry of the stylised floral pattern chosen one day by my mother, hang my childhood memories. True enough, it gives me a jolt seeing it again today. But that’s a reaction to distant and deep seated memories as they come flooding back to me, to the thoughts I hear myself thinking, not to the repetitious pattern itself.

For several years now, mural decorations have occupied an important role in the works of the American artist, Karen Kilimnik. She loves copying draperies and tapestries or using their designs as backgrounds in her paintings. In these works she has managed to capture the essentially retaining nature of wall decorations. These surfaces, upon which our gaze alights in the course of our daily routine, act like sponges, absorbing our emotions. And that also goes for crumbling plaster or an uneven brick wall.

Emotions are there for the picking, the picking, that is, of those who know how. Not even a rose is necessarily moving for everyone. Knowing what’s behind the rose is what counts, like the uncountable trials and errors an obsessed gardener has gone through, to obtain, for instance, a large, magnolia-grandiflora-white rose with fleshy petals.

Perhaps, though, you prefer a traditional rose. If so, that’s probably because you know it’s an old-time rose; because you detect something
primal in its scant, rumpled and fragile orange-tinted petals, so reminiscent of a poppy’s. There it stands, a silent survivor, a witness, by contrast, to the fierce manipulation it has been subjected to in an attempt to change its colour, size, consistency, and any other of its primary characteristics.

We could say that emotions simultaneously involve thinking and perceiving or perception through more or less rational knowing in indistinguishable conjunction with sensibility. I know, for instance, what Fragonard is on about when he talks of young skin and, what’s more, I perceive it in my every breath when I look at one of his paintings. I’m familiar with the bitter crust of expressionist painting from having dabbled in this style and I’m quite happy to let myself be overwhelmed by it, as if for a moment the pictorial anger and mine were in perfect synch. It may be remote, yet it’s the kind of anger I myself once felt and now there it is staring back at me, embodied and conveyed by the yellow, green, orangecoloured matter on the canvas, reminiscent of leaves as they turn to another colour.

And what about a self-portrait by Francis Bacon; am I stirred or shocked by it? If I’ve never seen one before and its meaning is obscure to me, then probably not. I might feel a bit queasy myself, though, if someone were to explain the picture and open my eyes to the fact that it depicts someone throwing up. But given time to understand that the picture is showing someone who could even be me in the throes of one of my worst fits, or that’s what I could end up looking like if I neglect myself, then there’s something that could really stir up my feelings, indeed a wide range of them.

I find it very moving to see the door left ajar, blocked by a protruding piece of metal, in Federico García Lorca’s house in Granada, where he would go in summer with his family. A long time has gone by since then. Yet that half closed, half open door blocked at an acute angle is as though it were on hold. If I were to try to enter the secret room, my progress would be hampered by what appears to be a thick forest inside, barely discernable from without. It’s like a barrier of animated bark obstructing the entrance, a sculptured tree gone berserk. Instead it’s a stationary figure, a statue by Cristina Iglesias. But what if I were ignorant of the fact that Lorca had died too soon? What if I didn’t know that there were still so many rooms left closed and untouched that he could have explored? And that trees live longer than us and often choose to put their roots down in the most unlikely places; that there’s hardly anything tougher than roots to tear up, be it for plants or humans, especially when such roots are by way of free and nonconformist thinking? What if I didn’t know any of these things? What if I were not even to have an inkling of them, or if they were lost to memory, set aside and stored in some remote corner of the mind not consciously accessible? If such knowing were beyond my ken, wouldn’t emotions be equally out of reach?

The surprise at something unexpected or mild pleasure for something familiar are common sensations. Real emotions, though, are only for those who can cast a knowing gaze on things and in their knowing forego their  musings and leave themselves open to their feelings.