It would be several years ago that a Facebook friend mentioned the word ‘otiose’. Now those of you steeped in the English language will know that this is not only an adjective, but a noun. For there is an animal called an otiose, and it is, as the name suggests, otiose.
I’ve been wondering about followers for a while now, especially since there’s a possibility that I will be setting up some professional websites using a local provider. You see, if I transfer this site to a non-Wordpress format, I will lose all my treasured followers!
It is true that, like Rodin, one can see the beauty of the whole that lies in but a part of the sculpture – that is to employ our imagination in the way a true artist intends. Like Tom Thomson’s paintings that on first view appear only half finished; but that is their art, they are there for you to finish in your mind. And in finishing it, you add something more than the imagery, you add the birdsong and the scent of wild flowers or the lapping of the waves on the lakeside.
Rodin took this a little further in that he would find himself inspired to sculpt an arm or a leg with a particular gesture – and whilst this is clearly the stuff of genius, it is still in the realms of being a practice piece. Art is an expression of one’s own relationship to nature – be it through colour, sound or form. We do not have relationships with arms or legs, we have relationships with the humans they are part of.
The myth of Pygmalion which is spoken of in Ovid’s Metamorphosis has Pygmalion searching for beauty incarnate. This search takes the form of his making his image of beauty as a sculpture, the beauty that lies in the female form. The Greeks weren’t partial about beauty, they saw it in everything – but they did see it at its highest in mankind. So Pygmalion set about his sculpture which he found enrapturing.
The tale of the six citizens of Calais dates back to the time when the English king, Edward the Third had besieged the port of Calais during the Hundred Years War between England and France. A war that essentially saw the French wrest control of most of Northern France from the English Crown. At the time, in 1347, the city of Calais was still under the English crown. An English Crown that was of French, that is to say, Norman blood. European politics in the fourteenth century was complicated, and it hasn’t got any better since.
This isn’t about Thomas Paine’s famous work. What I want to look at is the nature of the legal framework that treats citizens equally. I cannot include the British for they are subjects of the crown and as such have but few rights. Here in Europe, a citizen is a far more powerful figure. What’s more, they know it.