Inspired by Swan No. 9 by Hilma af Klint (1915)
Watercolour, gouache and metal leaf on paper
26 x 26 cm
© Hesse 2023
When thinking about the task of painting a self-portrait, and relating it to the artwork of another artist, I decided to work with Swan No. 9 by the Modernist Hilma af Klint. As a contemporary of Kasimir Malevitch, Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, and even predating them in parts of their work, she was admitted at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts. Unlike most other female European artists at that time. All of them found inspiration in the Theosophical Movement. And that roots in the popularity of spiritual and occult movements among artists by the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century.
Although I do not consider myself to be very spiritual, there is a high degree of complexity, attempts of depicting the visible and the non-visible perceivable in many of af Klints powerful and radiant paintings. This caught my attention a couple of years ago. Her Swan No. 9 is a highly abstracted and geometrical depiction of two Swans in black and white, yellow and blue (masculinity and femininity). A dualistic approach at first glance, and yet, one realises after a closer look, that there is in fact something non-dualistic happening: polarities striving for unity, a connection of everything right down to the atomic scale (i.e. macrocosm equals microcosm).
My interpretation of Hilma af Klints painting Swan No.9 takes place 108 years later. Many things have changed since then others have not. There were around 1,65 billion people living on the planet in 1900. In 2021 almost 8 billion. Since the 1980ies we have been going through an increasingly powerful process of individualisation that, little by little, deprives us of our social skills and social cohesion. Being an open and sensitive person, I find this development quite worrying. We have an understanding today that everything in our world is connected – one way or the other. We are also further afar from nature mentally than ever before in the history of humankind. And yet we are all one. We are all creating our reality.
This is the background of the painting underneath, those are the thoughts that were present when creating it.
Carola Hesse 