Written by: Prof Kobus Kruger Centre for mysticism www.mysticism.co.za
The art of Marcella de Boom, as we see it revealed in these twelve paintings, is mystical art. The mystical eye sees deeper than the physical world of thoughts. Her art invites us to enter contemplatively into the mysterium of the transcendent, ultimate, absolute dimension of our lives – into a realisation of our true origin and destiny as human beings.
|
As mystical art, Marcella's paintings suggest the experience of a horizon of ultimacy. With their use of concrete and abstract archetypal symbols, these paintings evoke an experience, a perspective, a state of reality and understanding hovers on the edges of our common-sense, everyday experience. A breakfast in a garden, if seen in its true context becomes an experience of paradise.
On that edge, Marcella's art sees the individual thing as part of a universal nexus in which part and part, and part and whole, are mutually inclusive. The small world of a child list in her painting is part of the cosmos as womb of all.
In Marcella's mystical art the ambivalent, paradoxical relationship between the transcendence and the immanence of the absolute in ordinary life is upheld. These two dimensions are not 'two', but not 'one' either; not 'different', but not 'the same' either. The mystical painting works magic; it is alchemy: the acrylic paint becomes transparent to the gold of true reality. Ordinary life is mysteriously transformed into something sublime, while remaining what it is in its very ordinariness. In the everyday act of needlework, interior and exterior, the transcendent and the ordinary coincide.
Mystical art, hovering on the threshold between the ordinary and the absolute, moves between awe, even terror('the dark night of the soul') on the one hand, and on the other hand, rapture before the radiating clarity of an inexpressible beauty. Marcella's paintings are aglow with the second: with profound peace and contagious happiness.
Marcella's mystical art is diagnostic as well as therapeutic. It reveals the human condition of alienation (our 'winter dreams'), but – beyond that – it shows us the promise of personal growth as part of exuberant cosmic, divine reality ('summer songs').
As mystical art, Marcella's work radiates the honesty and integrity of an original, visionary human being and artist. These paintings, seeing an showing the unseen in the ordinary, exceed cultural, religious and historical limitations. Her paintings show an inner affinity to Mahayana Buddhism with its intuition of ordinary reality being permeated with ultimacy (Zen Art). These powerful expressions of visionary mysticism also remind us strongly of the female visionary mysticism of a Hildegard of Bingen (twelfth century_ and a Hadewich of Antwerpen (thirteenth century). And Marcella envisions the perennial yearning linking western Culture and religion with ancient Africa
|
|
