NOSTALGIA AND FERNWEH

What I describe as a remembering-longing/future-yearning is partly encompassed within the terms nostalgia and the German word Fernweh. Nostalgia is an ache of memory, an intangible and bittersweet human experience. It is sadness over loss of home and past, but yet this loss is never total, since our memories serve to keep this world (albeit an altered version) alive in our act of remembering. Nostalgia can simultaneously be a reassuring, comforting occurrence, bringing a distant hope and foreboding of pleasures to be (re)gained.

Fernweh (German literally translated as far-ache or far-away-longing) expresses the reverse of and yet is a persistent companion to nostalgia (that home-ache or homecoming-pain). Fernweh, like nostalgia, can be both an inner anguish and exhilaration. One does not preclude the other, and this bi-polar experience can overcome us through commonplace objects like photographs, smells, songs or storybooks.

We can in fact experience a forward-nostalgia for what we have not yet physically observed, because our search for homecoming itself lands us in memories and constructed realities, which in turn redirect us to our longing for a place not yet known, and most probably, not here in our three-dimensional plane.

How to better express this bittersweet synthesis of nostalgia and Fernweh than C.S. Lewis in his essay, “The Weight of Glory:”

“In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves now, I feel a certain shyness, I am almost committing an indecency, I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you – the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both.

We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering.

The books or music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not them, it only came through them, and what came through them was the longing. These things – the beauty, the memory of our own past – are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not yet heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”

WANDERLUST AND TRAVEL

Wanderlust is incurable; I'm homesick for somewhere I've never been. I desire to explore and to discover. Yet with every trip, I find myself pining for more. With every journey, my soul expands. Yet this expanse is never filled: as the capacity grows, so too the longing.

This expanding of the soul comes with an awareness of an inborn desire for a true home, the realization of which I have not yet found on this earth. And so this long pursuit, this pilgrimage made by every man, this sweet homesickness calling me somewhere I have not yet found.

In traveling, I search the earth, discovering new people, colors, truth, ways of life, myself. When I later paint, I travel again, both in memory and in imagination. Remembering and yearning are intrinsically linked. In our memories, however clinical we recall them, surface our own longings, and in our future imagining, we can’t help but reflect memories.

I intend my paintings to make people feel closer to home, even as they are being taken away on an adventure. I want them to catch a glimpse of a new place; to travel somewhere they've never been. I want to bring people out of their current reality: to feel the light, smell the air, and feel connected, as if they had been there themselves. I want the viewer to imagine and yet to remember. Saint Augustine wrote, “the world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” I want to translate these unread pages on my canvases, inviting viewers to read a visual transliteration of the world’s book.

A FLASHBACK OF SOMETHING THAT NEVER EXISTED

My art is inspired by my travels and experiences. In a sense, “I had a flashback of something that never existed” (Louise Bourgeois).

As soon as a moment has passed, that world exists only in memory and in photographs. We are in fact remembering people and events that no longer exist. They are no longer current reality. These memories that now constitute that previous reality are susceptible to exaggeration, extension, alteration and decay.

And memories, fleeting and morphing phenomena that they are, will also inevitably blend with our own longings and fantasies, and then the two are nearly impossible to separate. We sometimes say that every person interprets their reality through their own “lens.” These mingled yearnings, experiences, dreams and memories constitute my unique lens.
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Photo: Paula Watts Photography

LOSS AND LONGING

I experiment with the visual imagery of loss and longing; a loss of life or memories and a pervasive sense of Fernweh. Decaying man-made structures speak to me as tangible representations of abandonment and memory. Even though the particular building and its story are unknown to the viewer, the image is transcendent and recalls associations. These abandoned human structures solicit a narrative for the viewer. These narratives are supplied by one’s own experience, generative imagination and memory. In supplying the story, however unconsciously, unfulfilled desires and past longings resurface.

Houses are wombs for growth, change, and rites of passage. They seem to be alive, with eyes that see and ears that hear. Lonely buildings stir in me a sense of wistfulness, since someone built the structure for a purpose, for which it is no longer needed.

Empty open spaces have obvious connotations of loneliness, abandonment or loss. They are a void, either where something was or could be. The beauty of nature heightens my emotions, and an ambiguous sense of longing overwhelms me. Suddenly I am very small, or very alone. And something outside of me is very beautiful and very great. I am unsure how to feel, other than pining for something that was, or is, or will be. Again, this imagery produces obscure emotions that flood my senses, even as I struggle to decipher where they came from.

To lament: to express sorrow, mourning, or regret; often demonstratively or passionately.

As the coronavirus moved its way across the globe, I decided to take my questions to canvas: Why suffering? How long? What for? How do we deal with grief? Where is God in this?

It appears the great programme of Earth 2020 has glitches. Unprecedented failures, illness, and turmoil have taken the world by surprise. We see new reports of famine, war, mass death and grief. But nothing drives home the reality and gravity of suffering like personal experience. Loss and suffering, two inescapable aspects of the human condition, are long-standing themes in my work.

My abstract wondering became concrete in May, when uninvited chaos stormed through. As if a premonition, my abstract work themes of grief and lament became fact for me this year, wrapped in the context of worldwide groaning and mourning in 2020.

Two emergency surgeries and the loss of my first pregnancy left me unable to work for several months. The questions of “why?” became more focused: Why me? Why my body? Why this pain? I felt that my body had betrayed me. And I could not change it, no matter how hard I tried, prayed, worked, denied or screamed.

Shortly after, I received devastating news of the tragic death of an intimately close friend. The pain was compounded, and no words could help me process my depression and anger. I turned to my art, desperately treading water. Dance became a new outlet for expression. I used paint and my body to express my mourning. This movement, initially impossible after the surgeries, was an outlet for intense rage, fear and nervous energy. My questions grew louder: Where were You? Why did this happen? Can’t it be undone?

I found comfort in reading and re-reading the experiences of J.S. Bach, Corrie ten Boom, Pete Greig, Sally McClung, and countless others enduring suffering. God did not abandon them, nor forget them in their moments of despair. Sorrow wants to be communal. In the darkest moments, I was aware of God’s nearness in a way I had never experienced. I didn’t receive the answers to my questions, “why?” - but I did receive comfort. No pat answers or silver linings, just the original meaning of com-fort: with-strength. Strength to go on living and to trust, in spite of not understanding. I did not triumph over adversity, but rather surrendered to the inescapable human practice of lamenting.

“Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state, but a process.”

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In the series "Lament", I am navigating through the consequences of traumatic events, instinctively creating work that is unexpected, unfinished and raw. Incomplete forms and figures, appearing and disappearing in one another, signify a lack of control. In many of the images, a distorted horizon or perspective (and, in some, no horizon or perspective at all) reinforce a sense of overwhelming helplessness. This lack of orientation requires the viewer to sort through forms and shadows, which mirrors swimming through grief. Magnified by a struggle with depression, the work displays the felt disconnect between self and surroundings. Intuition takes over where understanding breaks down.

The recurring darkness in the images is neither good nor bad. There is melancholy, a sense of foreboding and of mystery. Yet there is also light seeping in, and repeated imagery of growing plants. Flora that flows in and around the images signifies life and steadfast truth in an otherwise uncontrollable world.

Not all hope is lost.

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