Introduction
In my personal approach, this is how a fine art image is created: through silence, composition, and existential reflection.
All artful designs have two distinct histories: a personal history and an object-oriented history. For instance, Mozart believed that the Requiem was ordered especially for his own death, so it’s not hard to imagine the inner struggle that he had when he wrote it. On the other hand, the structure, the vocal parts, and the D minor scale are part of Mozart’s objective choice.
Overwhelmed by the burden of his deafness, Beethoven introduces in the last movement of the 135 quartet the “Es muss sein” (It must be) dialogue, which, due to its repetitions, creates the sensation of anxiety that you experience when you are facing a very difficult decision. Beethoven himself notes above the score “Grave” and then “Allegro”, showing probably the way in which the human being is preparing for its passing.
Finding inspiration
My personal history with this image that I am presenting today begins many years ago in the train route between Iasi city and Timisoara city. “Trivial! It’s above trivial!” – you may say at first glance. It was the second year of my student life in Cluj city and I had just discovered Milan Kundera, from whom I also borrowed the title for this piece.
I perfectly recall that moment! It was just in the beginning of Spring and the locomotive was splitting up a meadow freshly painted green. Life started to pulse again with intensity through the thin and fragile wheat which was bending delicately in the morning breeze. In retrospect, that moment became essential in understanding how a fine art image is created—not only from concept, but from the unexpected rhythm of lived experience.
The eternal return, a mysterious concept with which Nietzsche put in difficulty a lot of philosophers. For the wheat, this happens over and over again every Spring of every year. If it would not grow every year, life would resemble a shadow and the magnificent process of turning the wheat into bread would be useless if life would not have the heaviness of revival.
Reflections on repetition and identity
Meanwhile, the train has stopped in Turda city. The travelers are nervously climbing the narrow stairs of the wagon. The same scene repeats itself over and over again at each of the train’s stops. The same fuss, the same grabbing of the stair’s dirty banister with a clenched hand.
As the German saying “Einmal ist keinmal”, meaning “once does not count”, it’s like it never even existed. What would it be if the train that I’m on would only stop one time and then it would go continuously until the end of the railroad?
It’s just like now, as I am writing these words: thoughts go through my mind one after another, letters burst suddenly out of my keyboard. But what would have happened if I would have had a draft of my train ride or of this entire story? Would I have told it a little bit better, perhaps?Maybe I would have eliminated some of the sentences and replaced them with other ones… I often ask myself how a fine art image is created when emotion overwhelms structure.
Questions! Too many questions!
It’s 8 o’clock in the morning and I am sitting here writing for about 40 minutes. My coffee has gotten cold, I already smoked three cigarettes and I’ll light up one more in a minute. The same thing happened yesterday morning… I’m rereading the last paragraph. Again, and again.
I realize that without this “draft” my life would have no background, my life would be like a concept without a frame because strangely, the repeatability gives me the heaviness that I need to start each day.
Image story
About today’s image. Dürer, Caravaggio and Rembrandt represented in such a glorious matter are watching the show of the lightness of being from afar, just like a puppeteer glances into the box where the show that he created is taking place.
To explore similar themes, see also Salome and Saint John, where silence, tension and repentance are sculpted into a symbolic composition.This entire process reflects how a fine art image is created—through poetic thought, symbolic weight, and intentional visual tension.
Layout and Composition – How a Fine Art Image is Created
The scenery is poor and almost plain. It’s an empty room with high walls and sand on the ground. The windows are placed symmetrically which separates the space in three identical surfaces.
The feminine body caught underwater in a complete weightless state is placed on the ascending diagonal, breaking the stillness of the verticals.
I imagined that the floating of the body in a gravitational universe would not be less than glorious. The lightness of being is portrayed in the body’s reflection in the thin layer of the surface of the water, which separates what is Here from the enigmatic Beyond. This image offers a powerful example of how a fine art image is created through symbolic language and spatial narrative.
How a Fine Art Image is Created – Viewer’s Perspective and Final Note
The viewpoint in racursi or contre-plonjé suggests the viewer is in reversed perspective and becomes a live participant, counter parting the other three viewers watching from the windows. This change in perspective challenges how a fine art image is created—no longer from the outside, but from within the act of seeing
Therefore, I thought of a double paradigmatic reinterpretation: one of the inversion between the viewer and the actor and one of the representation of shapes in space.
Only now, at this very moment in my storytelling, I can easily confess that the lightness of being as I imagined it in the train overlaps our life’s purpose. This purpose, as it is discovered step by step, loads the being with a heaviness that is easier to bear than its counterpart, the lightness.How a Fine Art Image is Created – Viewer’s Perspective and Final Note
