Ridiculous to the Sublime

After the underworld, a journey heavenward to Kelvingrove Art Gallery, visiting paintings I’ve known since childhood.  Generations of Scottish children have been taken on rainy day outings to Kelvingrove.  Swings, ice cream and brass-bold squirrels, being located close by in Kelvingrove Park.  It is a beautiful area of Glasgow’s West End where I lived for many years.  It’s a liminal place.  I’m drawn back every visit. 

As a child, one of the paintings terrified me; ‘Christ of Saint John of the Cross’ (1951) by Salvador Dali. I used to peek around the doorways, relieved when he wasn’t there.  Then my blood would run cold, like seeing the child-catcher in ‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’, when I looked out of the doorway where he loomed like a black magic spell.  It felt like being in a terrible maze.   Could I outsmart him this time?  I never did.  I was convinced that drooping head was going to raise up, look straight at me and boom ‘You’re going to the bad fire’.  I had nightmares that it happened.  He has piercing blue eyes.  Just saying.

It's a work of genius, but it is not my favourite painting.

However, ‘Druids Bringing in the Mistletoe’ (1890) by David Henry and E.A. Hornell holds a different kind of magic entirely.  It took Munich by storm in the 1890 exhibition.  A collaboration between the two artists, in modernist style, unusual in its use of gold leaf and pattern.  A decade before Gustav Klimt.  Who may have seen it at the Glaspalast.  Just saying.

Glasgow Boys paintings can be mesmerising.  Obsessed with painting twilight and moonlight, their paintings absorb the eye, pulling you in, invoking the magic of twilit summer evenings, peace of sundown, birds roosted, look at the colour of the sky.

How do they even do that?

https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/christ-of-st-john-of-the-cross-83704

https://collections.glasgowmuseums.com/mwebcgi/mweb?request=record;id=695;type=101#