Art historian and poet TJ Clark speaks at The Wheeler Centre, Melbourne.
In this interview Clark speaks about art, poetry and the special quality of artworks that we return to again and again. For me this is the work on Claude Monet, for Clark it is the work of Nicolas Poussin. Clark also notes the tricky processes involved with writing about art from a personal point of view. I particularly like the part in this interview where he says he was staking everything in the book of the idea that “visual images, paintings, can carry as much weight, depth, complexity and intensity as this”. This is a very important question I think, for the (art) critic, because it points to the way we idealise images, the way our reading of them involves our experiences.
I’ll always associate Monet’s work with being a kid because his was the first artist I really liked. I imagined living in the water lily garden and walking along the garden paths with nasturtiums. And I spent a long time looking at his water lily paintings. I cannot look at his work without these memories, memories which were triggered by a book about one girl’s journey to Monet’s garden. I just wanted to be that girl.
Below is an image mentioned in the interview: Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake, 1648.
