The more I considered the question, the more I realised that I am inspired by conversations with a couple of friends and that those conversations have something in common: They are allowed to hop from topic to topic, they get deeply personal, and they are quite unpredictable. Many great works of art are of course inspired by relationships, be they intellectual, romantic or friendly. This essay started out as an enquiry into the role my friends, or ‘muses’, in the writing of my current novel and my previous one, Rembrandt’s Mirror (2015). Your eyes, faithful to what is moving, And yet still holding mine, which are moist too, You don’t look away, not even for a moment, Whatever you found down there, Slips back in, making a little wave.Ī tear pools in the bottom lid, stays there. Stirring up silt, which hangs for moments Light filters through debris of leaves, Suddenly the waters clear, Yours – a forest pool lit by evening sun. My poem Meeting is from my current novel. It still seems remarkable to me that two strangers looking at the same painting could meet in this way – as if for a moment they’d experienced the world through one and the same pair of eyes. She’s so alive and yet she’s dead.’ His eyes were a little moist yet neither of us broke the eye contact, and while we continued to simply look, something seemed to be becoming clear, as if truth itself was now ‘feelable’.Īfter that, the conversation took on a different tone and depth, and our dialogue has continued ever since. He looked at the painting and then at me, his face suddenly soft with being moved, and answered: ‘Her lips are slightly parted, as if about to speak. I asked Adam, ‘What does it make you feel?’ It was as if, for a moment, in this triangle, no-one was a stranger. Adam also contemplated the card and remarked that it was one of his favourite paintings. Hendrickje Stoffels was sitting in a chair looking back at me, as if I was no stranger to her. It is thought to depict the woman who entered his house as a servant and became his partner (they never married) and perhaps his muse. It depicted a painting by Rembrandt, Portrait of Hendrickje Stoffels, c. ‘My cup is full,’ he added.Īfter about twenty minutes of conversation I noticed a postcard pinned on the wall behind his desk. After we sat down, he told me he had just received several thousand emails in response to a paper on Aphantasia, a mysterious disorder involving a complete loss of visual imagination. His area of expertise was cognitive and behavioural neurology, but he also had a passion for the arts and was the author of Consciousness: A User’s Guide. I was hoping to persuade him to become the supervisor for my creative writing PhD. The small room was a cave of bookshelves and the table seemed to barely be holding up under foot-high stacks of papers. The first time I met Professor Adam Zeman was in his office at the University of Exeter, England. In this essay, we discover that, for some, a muse can come from unexpected places and consider the essential role of emotion, closeness and truth in the creative process. These themes filter through many artworks in the NGV Collection. Collaboration, friendship, inspiration, loss, love and connection.
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