The Vital Art of D.H. Lawrence: Vision and Expression
This book by Jack Stewart is filled with rich and evocative language, as colourful and expressive as the works he seeks to describe. On Vitalism in Lawerence and Van Gogh, Stewart recalls their affinity with startling brilliance:
Both artists has a genius for empathy, an urge to express “the life-thrust,” as Lawrence puts it. H.D., feeling “the flame and the fire, the burning, the believing,”...
He saw “colour seeking life”...and the objects in his still lifes “as mystic symbols of obscure vital instincts”.
“We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos” (Apocalypse 149)
“Leaping out of greenness, came the black-and-orange cock with red comb, his tail-feather streaming lustrous...So the green jets of leaves unspread on the fig-tree, with the bright, translucent green blood of the tree”...The reclaimed phenomenal world has a color, glamour, and force lacking in the world of shadowy ideals...
“[the] upper world came almost with a flash, because of the glimmer of snow...The hills on either hand were pale blue in the dusk, and the hedges looked savage and dark. The snow was trampled between the railway lines, but far ahead, beyond the black figures of miners moving home, it became smooth again...Below, the lights of the put came out crisp and yellow among the darkness of the buildings, and the lights of Old Aldecross twinkled in rows down the bluish twilight.”
“[the] heavy gold glamour of approaching sunset lay over all the colliery district, and the ugliness overlaid with beauty was like a narcotic to the senses”
“an amazing lucidity and intensity of living”
Concentric, sunlike circles surround the old man’s red-rimmed eyes: he seems to live scorched and shriveled in the flare and blood-heat of the sun, his stare and blind persistence.
The sun itself looms large and solid...Here the golden orb symbolizes creative energy and the cycle of human life and seasons...a huge sun, radiating gold flocked with green, flooding the fields with orange and violet-blue as it sinks below the horizon. Across this arena strides the expressionless Sower, scattering seed with an imperious gesture, at once a force of nature and the embodiment of purposeful human activity.”
Flickering green brush strokes interweave with blue of sky, gyrating blue trunks with green of leaves, green-blue flecks with surging flamelike ochers of earth.
The earth is alive and everything is in motion: the blue mountain mass billows in waves like the sea, the foreground heaves in great undulations, and the upspringing olive trees gesticulate in a spiral dance.
