An excerpt. Marion Pennell ©


Cynthia Asia

Cezanne's voice was the most intense, the most absorbed in concentration, and she thought the most intellectual. Picasso's voice was dirty, filthy, leering and calculating. Monet's voice was light-hearted and musical. And she related best to Van Gogh, because through his voice she could hear the voices he heard, the sun spoke, the fields spoke, and the flowers... the irises, the sunflowers spoke with the full bloom of growth and flowering..... vibrated with the cycle of seed, fertility, maturation, and disintegration to death.

Now that she had refined the ability to discern each voice, to turn off the noise of the competing voices, she loved going to the museum. The first time she heard the voices was at the Landscape in Provence show. It began as white noise, became a loud hiss, then broke into thousands of overlapping voices and sounds. Actually she wasn't able to distill the noise into voices for quite awhile, and when she heard the cacophony in her head she was sure she must be quite barking mad. When she calmed down and her anxiety ceased, she "heard" (although not in words, it was hard to describe) lists, nouns at first, place names, colour names, the artist's name, his family's and colleague's and caretaker's and mistress's names... that evolved into lists of adjectives... The lists came pouring into her consciousness so fast, like there was no pause from one concept to the next.... ProvencevioletochreMargeuriteFranceriversunshineEmiliebladereflectionscarletcrimsonmagentaTheorooftoptreetopgrasswallAlexandremountaincloudsbridgehilltopumbercharcoaldinnersoupAlbertroadhorizon

She slowed her mind again and the lists started to self-organize, places and their adjectives together, nature and her adjectives together, people and their descriptions together... Simultaneous, yet distinctly separate. How did that work? Now she was intrigued. But she realized she had been standing in the same place for quite some time, and moved into the next room, planted herself facing the only un-peopled Renoir landscape in the room.

© 2006 Marion Pennell

note: see also The Passion Of The Rubens

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