Art through the eye of the Camera
A little writing prompt from Andrei Tarkovsky
“The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as example. The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good.” (Andrei Tarkovsky - From Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema, page 43)
'“….to plough and HARROW his soul…” in preparation for death. Now here is a thought and an expression of exactly what I am doing here in “Harrowings” - certainly the death of parents is a natural and expected experience for any child. To lose a child for a parent however? What could be more harrowing in the negative sense? My parents were spared that experience, thus far. I expect that my mother will not live to see the death of either my sister or myself, but time will tell.
The main point here is to “harrow” the soul - the spirit - the living essence of the person and Tarkovsky captured that function of art in this brief statement. I used a prompt to generate a cinematic image. In it, shadowy patrons of a museum regard the art as one figure, out-of-focus, stands with his back to a wall behind which is a tattered abstract work which could be an entry in the Peeling Paint Appreciation Society. This reminds that we are the ones that are temporary and we need to be prepared at any time for our possible exit.
Working on boxing the stamp collection that my late father and I built up over the course of my lifetime and most of his, I’m confronting his death. As each box is sealed, it enters into a new life that these stamps and related philatelic artifacts will lead. It is just one of the “immortality projects” which my father engaged in and which the Harold B Gill Foundation will be stewarding.
In the next post for paid subscribers, I will be collecting together links to numerous works published in the Colonial Williamsburg Journal. A future project will be to collect and republish these works as both print and ebooks in one or more separate publications.
Back to packing the boxes and thank you all for reading. Please provide any feedback to me directly here or at HB.Gill@gmail.com. We’d love to hear from you!