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The absinthe drinker3/30/2023 Again, we have a figure of a woman dressed in black, save for her white petticoat revealed by the gust of the wind from the title. The wind as a motif appears again in the painting “The Gust of Wind” from 1904. The colour scheme and sharp contrats makes me think of the German Expressionist cinema. The contrast between the tread and the riser of the stairs is sharp and precise. I can imagine her climbing up the stairs and stopping for a moment only to look into the dark abyss bellow. It’s only the woman and the wind on the stairs. The space around the woman, dark, empty and isolate, oozes an equally nightmarish vibe. The figure is painted in such a nightmarish way that it could also be the figure of death itself. Painting “Vertigo” shows a figure of a woman shrouded in black, her long gauzy black scarf dancing in the wind. A strange chill goes down my spine when I get immersed in his dark world. If I had to chose, I would chose Ensor’s art as my favourite, but Spilliaert’s artworks are something that I gaze at half in awe and half in fear. The two painters, despite the generational gap between them, actually became friends and connected over their art endeavors. Both Ensor and Spilliaert’s art have an element of eerieness, it must be something in the Ostend air. Skeletons that pop up in almost all of Ensor’s paintings are at once creepy and comical. Interestingly, the town of Ostend gave the art world another amazing painter James Ensor. Even in childhood he showed a love of doodling and drawing and this love grew into real painting. Spilliaert, a reclusive child with frail health grew up into an equally sickly and reclusive young man who took solace in the world of art. Léon Spilliaert was born in the Belgian coastal town of Ostend, on the 28 July 1881. Big crazy eyes, thin lips pressed together, almost comically large and dark circles around her eyes, her flesh morbidly pale she sees something that we cannot see and the glass of absinthe hides the secret. Her silhouette, with the hat, flowing hair, dress and even necklace bring to mind the lovely Edwardian photographs and other portraits from that time, but Spilliaert’s absinthe drinker lives not in Edwardian world but in her own dark fantasy. The woman and the space around her are both painted in the same shades of black and midnight blue, as if the woman is inseparable from the space that she resides in. If you look into them long enough she will suck you into her nocturnal world of nightmares and lost hopes. I mean, just look into the eyes of the woman in the painting “The Absinthe Drinker” two dark abysses, her pupils swirling rivers of dark, haunting absinthe laced dreams. I have felt drawn to Léon Spilliaert’s dark, disturbing and nightmarish paintings for years now, but I always found them just a tad too disturbing to write about. Léon Spilliaert, The Absinthe Drinker (La Buveuse d’Absinthe), 1907
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