Windows into Advent - Day Twelve

Reflection

I am sharing two works by artist Marianne von Werefkin during Advent because her paintings convey the power and presence of light in the darkness. Light pours out of house windows onto the surrounding streets. It suggests to me the light of our interior lives bringing hope and a light to our world. Werefkin described art as "a concentrated feeling of love elevated to a world view and translated into an artistic language of symbols". “All bores me in the world of facts, I see an end, a limit to all things and my heart thirsts for the infinite and for eternity.” Writing about the diaries which Marianne von Werefkin composed during the 1900s, the writer Natalya Tolstaya noted that they reveal "a soul moulded by much suffering and many a loss, the soul of a woman and an artist". This statement might be taken to apply to Werefkin's entire body of work, which was shaped not only by a century's worth of Russian and European artistic tradition, but also by an intense social and spiritual consciousness, and by the peculiar pressures brought to bear on her as a woman in a creative world dominated by men.

Werefkin applied the principles of social and religious awareness she had learned in her youth to the Expressionist idiom of her maturity, finding in the principle of abstraction a new way of expressing the human spirit.

Werefkin's works are often populated by cramped, hunched figures in black, generally women, generally implied to be impoverished city-dwellers or laborers. While the Expressionist movement had always been defined by a form of social awareness, Werefkin's work expresses the human concerns underlying the movement more clearly than most. Her compositions tethered around recognizable human subjects placed in the rural or urban landscape. Werefkin once stated "color bites at my heart", and this work indicates her ongoing fascination with color, combining various intense, vibrant hues within small areas of the canvas.

All information from this source- read more about this artist here 

Scripture

Do not rejoice over me, O my enemy;
   when I fall, I shall rise;
when I sit in darkness,
   the Lord will be a light to me.

Micah Chapter 7 verse 8

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Image Credits

Painting 1 (Header) Marianne von Werefkin, House with Lantern, 1917

Painting 2  (End of Post) Marianne von Werefkin, Storm Wind 1915-1917