Anabasis

Gustav Klimt

Carole Estrup

So Gustav Klimt has become the world’s most sought after painter. Is anyone
surprised?

Consider his time, the turn of the last century. It was an era of industrial robber
barons, failing royal empires, white and black slavery and social upheaval.
Incredible wealth boiled atop grim poverty, all of it condoned and encouraged
by various religious factions. Called the Age of Decadence, the artist himself
condemned Europe as a spreading pornography of crucifixes.

The women he portrayed might have come right out of case histories compiled
by Sigmund Freud. The vast majority of his upper crust patients suffered para-
lyzing hysteria, the doctor reported, caused by incest and other brutalities. Or
maybe Klimt’s models were actual corpses, their paleness highlighted by blue
shadows and hues of oxygen starved blood and flesh.

Certainly most of them seemed arrayed in broken, perverse poses. He encased
them in gold leaf robes or gowns heavy and solid as a sarcophagus. We get a
necrophilian kiss and the promise of much more to come.

Perhaps Klimt was simply prescient. Did he visualize the coming century of world-
wide butchery? Seer or not it is possible to see all of that sorrowful history in
Klimt’s work.

So now is the time to look at another painter, one who uses gold to tell us
about the living. She is Carole Estrup and for many decades she has recorded
the vitality of cultures which are our living, but endangered heritage. From the
rain forests and ritual huts of American natives to the ancient monuments of
China and India, out of our cave homes into the enlightened imagery of the
cosmos, she weaves visual evidence of a profound, ever tantalizing future.

Her figures are often crowded, interlocked in a dance of propagation. Examples
include “The Seven Continents” and a socio-political series which includes
“Rebirth of Africa” and “Paradise Lost”. Her earlier collection, called “Evolution of
the Soul”, was widely acclaimed and set amidst the stars like deities we imagine
explain the scientific secrets of eternity. More earthly concepts like “Creation of
the Four Winds” and “Anabasis” show us the natural phenomenon of energy, of
motion and upwelling with egocentric, human eyes.

Paintings depicting the lone human figure, such as the mysterious “The Smiling
Knight” are not rare, but they are also adazzle with living and physical spiritual
symbols. “The Swan of Tuonela” takes on the mythology of death, of a living
individual’s acceptance of that process. Yet all about every such individual life
in the plant and animal world goes on, and most of us happily accept that, too.

Gold, we have believed since early-human times, is a gift of the sun, of its body
and essence. Rather, we know now, our sun’s gift is light in all of its invisible
invaluable energies. Those colors are found on itself. They are the substance and
action with which all the creatures shout life, living, being! Some find Estrup’s vision
just the right antidote for our recent steady diet of victimization, betrayal and fear.
It might be named inspiration, resolve, even passion.