Johan Scott
11 Jan - 04 Feb 2007
JOHAN SCOTT
"Wonderful Me"
"There is this thing about me: that I'm so beautiful!" wrote Jean Sibelius in his diary. And why not, a handsome man, if you look at it in that light, in different ways at different ages. Worth a second glance - no wonder he never finished his Eighth Symphony.
Was Sibelius looking in the mirror, or in the glimmering waters of a spring?
The ancient myth of Narcissus tells of a beautiful youth who famished to death as he looked at his own image reflected on the surface of a spring. Ovid placed this myth in his "Metamorphoses", a work of poetry that has inspired so many, including Shakespeare, Caravaggio and Johan Scott.
The subject is simple, yet there is a great deal to it.
First of all the spring. Life is born from water, a spring produces water, in our minds thus giving birth to it. Water also creates an image, but even the stillest water lives and moves, light is refracted and the image changes.
Then the youth. According to Ovid, he was sixteen years old, boy and man at the same time, or a boy turning into a man. An important fact is ignored when the tale of Narcissus is recounted briefly. According to legend, he was the son of Liriope, the sky-blue nymph who fell in love with the river-god Kefisos. When the mother of the newborn child asked the soothsayer Teiresias whether the boy will live to be old, she received the reply: "Not if he will come to know himself".
Narcissus is driven to the spring by the curse of the nymph in love: "May he love like I do, something that cannot be attained." When the youth bends over the water to drink, he sees himself for the first time. That experience introduces yet another birth into the scene - that of self.
But then Ovidian slumber ensues. Faithful to the myth, the poet of "Metamorphoses" lets Narcissus pine in vain for his image and finally die to the accompaniment of mourning Echo. The first narcissi grew at the site.
This, too, is a metamorphosis, but why should he who found himself in the surface of the water have remained by the shore? I don't care so much for daffodils as to believe in such an end, and I don't even remember it properly. In the metamorphosis of my memory, the story told by Ovid is taken to its proper conclusion by the Chinese poet Li Po, who seven hundred years later drowned in a river when seeking the reflection of the moon.
To drown into a spring, a disintegrating reflection, the miracle of birth many times over, to drown into one's own wonderfulness. What else could Narcissus even have wanted from life?
Martti Anhava
© Johan Scott
NARCISSUS 5, 2006
oil on aluminium, 126 x 115 cm
"Wonderful Me"
"There is this thing about me: that I'm so beautiful!" wrote Jean Sibelius in his diary. And why not, a handsome man, if you look at it in that light, in different ways at different ages. Worth a second glance - no wonder he never finished his Eighth Symphony.
Was Sibelius looking in the mirror, or in the glimmering waters of a spring?
The ancient myth of Narcissus tells of a beautiful youth who famished to death as he looked at his own image reflected on the surface of a spring. Ovid placed this myth in his "Metamorphoses", a work of poetry that has inspired so many, including Shakespeare, Caravaggio and Johan Scott.
The subject is simple, yet there is a great deal to it.
First of all the spring. Life is born from water, a spring produces water, in our minds thus giving birth to it. Water also creates an image, but even the stillest water lives and moves, light is refracted and the image changes.
Then the youth. According to Ovid, he was sixteen years old, boy and man at the same time, or a boy turning into a man. An important fact is ignored when the tale of Narcissus is recounted briefly. According to legend, he was the son of Liriope, the sky-blue nymph who fell in love with the river-god Kefisos. When the mother of the newborn child asked the soothsayer Teiresias whether the boy will live to be old, she received the reply: "Not if he will come to know himself".
Narcissus is driven to the spring by the curse of the nymph in love: "May he love like I do, something that cannot be attained." When the youth bends over the water to drink, he sees himself for the first time. That experience introduces yet another birth into the scene - that of self.
But then Ovidian slumber ensues. Faithful to the myth, the poet of "Metamorphoses" lets Narcissus pine in vain for his image and finally die to the accompaniment of mourning Echo. The first narcissi grew at the site.
This, too, is a metamorphosis, but why should he who found himself in the surface of the water have remained by the shore? I don't care so much for daffodils as to believe in such an end, and I don't even remember it properly. In the metamorphosis of my memory, the story told by Ovid is taken to its proper conclusion by the Chinese poet Li Po, who seven hundred years later drowned in a river when seeking the reflection of the moon.
To drown into a spring, a disintegrating reflection, the miracle of birth many times over, to drown into one's own wonderfulness. What else could Narcissus even have wanted from life?
Martti Anhava
© Johan Scott
NARCISSUS 5, 2006
oil on aluminium, 126 x 115 cm