Silence and Light single work   essay  
Issue Details: First known date: 2020... 2020 Silence and Light
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Painting is a silent art, yet so few artists have mastered silence—in Australia, Jeffrey Smart; in America, Edward Hopper; and in Denmark, Vilhelm Hammershøi. If I do not dwell on Smart it is because I sense his debt to Hopper; Smart was born and raised in Adelaide, and though I have wanted him to win my love he has only won my admiration. Hopper, though, crept into my consciousness more than half a lifetime ago, and while I have not spent every moment of those years thinking about his paintings, it is impossible to imagine my life without them.' (Introduction)

Notes

  • Epigraph: I have always thought there was such beauty about a room like that, even though there weren’t any people in it, perhaps precisely when there weren’t any.1 —Vilhelm Hammershøi

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Meanjin vol. 79 no. 2 June 2020 19657092 2020 periodical issue 'The pandemic is a portal, Arundhati Roy wrote in early March, ‘a gateway between one world and the next’. We are yet to enter that next world, nor can we clearly see its shape from here. For now we are filled with one numbing certainty: the sad sense that the world we left behind as the coronavirus took hold is closed to us now, much as we might hanker for it, much as daily life is still formed around our memory of what it really ought to be.' (Jonathan Green, Editorial introduction) 2020 pg. 64-71
Last amended 25 Feb 2021 08:49:58
64-71 Silence and Lightsmall AustLit logo Meanjin
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