WATER

“The cure for anything is salt water: Sweat, tears or the sea.” - Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen)

Magpie Tales has chosen a Marina Moevs painting as a stimulus to get our creative juices flowing this week.

“Marina Moevs' breathtaking oil paintings present the often awe inspiring beauty of powerful natural events, such as floods, fires and storms. Seductively serene, they resonate with psychologically volatile meanings and metaphors, not only personally for the artist, but as collective archetypes that speak for humanity as a whole. Indeed, just as psychoanalytic discourse equates the unconscious with nature itself (from which the idea of ‘human nature’ evolved), Moevs' paintings employ natural imagery to express the autonomy and subjectivity of human moods. They also stand as brilliantly crafted and imagined ‘shrines’ that both associate and segregate human beings’ and nature’s mysteriously linked creativity.”

Andy Brumer

The paintings of this artist turned my mind to things anatomical and pathological. For what are we but water (60% of our body weight, in fact…).

Water

Water sustains us, for we are of water;

Our humours ebbing and flowing,

Running incessantly in our subcutaneous rivers:

Blood, phlegm, yellow and black bile.

Water nourishes, for without it we die;

Our bodies desertified, our a flesh mere husk

Where lack of juices fails to vivify:

Sweat, tears, saliva and other secretions.

Water within us, for we are born of it;

Creatures of some primordial sea that

We still carry inside us – hear the waves breaking:

Amniotic fluid, cerebrospinal fluid and tissue fluid.

Water kills, for we are designed for drowning;

Our lungs so easily filled with oedema,

Or with water breathed in, to stifle us:

Exudate, insudate, transudate and inspired water.

Water flows, runs, rushes, scours, floods;

Our tears tsunami-like, can overwhelm.

Lymph bubbles and swells painfully within confined space,

Our gastric juice corrodes, digests our flesh,

And we surrender, give up the ghost to some massive internal haematoma.

Our internal waters, sometimes placid like limpid lakes;

Sometimes rough seas that swallow whole islands – like Atlantis;

Our waters: Healing, nourishing, beneficial like breast milk;

But also destructive torrential rivers, that flatten our house;

Like vomit that we breathe in, a horrible aspirated death thus delivered.