Fragments of Experience: A Melodic, Moody, and Mystical Portrait of the Soul
By Isabelle Holloway
William Johnstone, Fragments of Experience, 1979, oil on canvas, 133.9cm x 243.8cm, University of Edinburgh.
When standing in front of Scottish abstract painter William Johnstone’s 1979 piece titled “Fragments of Experience”, a synesthetic sensation seems to flood its gilded core with god-like mastery. One may imagine the interaction between such “fragments” as akin to a masterful orchestral performance - some grand, magnum opus concluding the career of some madly geniused composer. A steady accelerando of the tempo from the deeper, resoundant cellos and tubas, reaching fortissimo, to the lighter, airier flutes and harps, settled safely a pianissimo; the darker masses which have sunk along the bottom border appear to arise and hover all aflutter about the blinding, hallowed light which consumes the larger portion of the remaining image. Such musical interplays between light and dark, or between cadence and dissonance, develop in similar passion to movements as in Bohemian composer Bedřich Smetana’s La Moldau - especially, as meant by the plot of its symphonic poem, by the vision of the Moldau River, which came to exist as two separate warm and cold springs before merging, in roaring euphony, into a single river.
A View of Prague from Lesser Town Shore of the Vltava River, circa 1850, watercolour, 22cm x 31cm.
This piece may be defined as an ultimate expression of the soul’s experience, without dilution, and the ultimate representation of all which has been brought to the artistic stage throughout the ages of human history - theatre, yes, but poetry, cinema, literature, music, among other forms, as well.
How in the world do these ideas stem from a mere painting, and an abstract one at that? What is the relationship between beauty and passion, and how is this relevant to “Fragments of Experience”, particularly? An explanation originates most strongly, perhaps, in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, who sees the character Alyosha, in the wake of his grief over his beloved religious teacher Zosima, experience a rapturous moment of complete enlightenment and serenity - one found in the innocent simplicities of his natural world:
““... his soul, overflowing with rapture, yearned for freedom, space, openness. The vault of heaven, full of soft, shining stars, stretched vast and fathomless above him. The Milky Way ran in two pale streams from the zenith to the horizon. The fresh, motionless, still night enfolded the earth. The white towers and golden domes of the cathedral gleamed out against the sapphire sky. The gorgeous autumn flowers, in the beds round the house, were slumbering till morning. The silence of earth seemed to melt into the silence of the heavens. The mystery of earth was one with the mystery of the stars....” (462)”
The essential truth to the human condition which Dostoevsky puts forth in this excerpt, and which remains pertinent to the tender explosion that is a soul’s “Fragments of Experience”, is one of beauty - and by beauty, or rather the sublime, not a soft, delicate, and untainted standard of aesthetics by which one can, say, simply gaze at a meadow catching the white wisps of dandelions floating along warm summer breezes, or at a jagged range of mountain peaks rising into the halo of a glorious red sun, in the mere, yet still beautiful, sensory sense, but one of a less superficial, more passionate kind. In other words, true and humanistic beauty is meant to be viewed behind the lens of, yes, passion, but also, etymologically, suffering. By such profound emotions which are inevitable to the landscape of any soul, the view of such a meadow or mountainscape, or of an ambiguous, individual moment of birth and realisation, as in such a portrait of “experience”, can become deeply shaded and nuanced through the terrain of true and human beauty, or of the sublime - whether by, say, the infernal flames of infatuation, or by the hollow dampness of sorrow. It may be true, too, that in suffering, a greater sensitivity and appreciation for the seemingly mundane is created, and that the bar for positive human emotion is lifted to a higher degree in correlation with the depth of suffering one has felt; in a physical or artistic scene, colours may become vivified, noises amplified, and emotions, as a whole, intensified.
By these thoughts, a meadow then, in the lens of the sublime brought about by suffering, and by the freedom of its expanse, can then rather relay not only the image of beautiful flowers, but can also contain all the buoyant sense of freedom found in one’s memories and hopes - for instance, perhaps, of the memory of running away from home into nearby, uncharted forest, or of the hope associated with an uncoloured, still-dawning life ahead for a recently wed couple. A mountainscape then, too, in the immensity of its glory, can relay the memory of the mutual joy felt by the first trophy won by one’s football team, or of the hope of re-experiencing the gift of life in the embrace of one’s own grandchildren.
Naturally, by coexisting on the same stage, all of these sublime self-reflections are complemented and heightened by the memories, and even hopes, of suffering. Behind the expanse found in a meadow of flowers may lay the memory of a vast, nocturnal jungle hushed with the mutated bodies of a soldier’s fallen comrades, or perhaps of a hope associated with a long-aspired career, only to find a life ahead where one feels alienated and suffocated by the burden of their work. Again, behind the immensity of a mountainscape may lay the memory of a home characterised by door-slams and empty liquor bottles, or of a hope to see one’s children grow up, but broken in the diagnosis of a late-stage cancer.
In the same vein, “Fragments of Experience” accomplishes this same feat, that is the relationship between beauty and passion, though in a more profound way. Because the piece is abstracted, this duality applies infinitely to the interpretations of the subconscious and its ensemble cast of memories and hopes. Without a clear distinction for what could be, for instance, a flower or a mountain, the speckles, swoops, and splashes, reds, blues, and yellows, and varying degrees of thickness and texture can freely assume whatever form the viewer pleases, such as a flower or a mountain, but also, say, as a pencil or a gecko, or as one’s sister or an apple, and so the possibility for self-discovery and tranquillity in the face of the sublime, even with such images, exists in an unlimited cosmos of artistic interpretation - one which can even exist outside of materiality, too, as such hazy shapes can translate into the fluid sweeps of time, or as the very inchoate essence of mania, comfort, or even politics. Politics, perhaps, can manifest as a scribbly, pressured, red slash, as in the one appearing on the lower-right portion of the large, yellow orb which forefronts the image. This yellow orb may take on the meaning of “humanity” or “society”, especially as a globe-shaped blob, while “politics”, composed of a smaller group of individuals, attempts to eat through an apparent border in the orb - and this thicker, denser border may be construed as “faith” or “community”. Even the faint, orange line bisecting this circle longitudinally can be seen as a tunnel which has led this “society” out of a darkened cumulonimbus gloom from the right, perhaps their “pre-revolutionary state”. All in all, these shapes, in every potential form, can narrate a story of varying complexity - whether one decides to meditate on a sole aspect of “Fragments of Experience”, or create a highly complex, immersive plot which rivals even that of the most prominent religious texts, is a unique and personal choice.
Left: William Johnstone, Portrait Emerging, 1976, oil on canvas, 88.9cm x 90.1cm, University of Edinburgh.
Right: William Johnstone, The Birth of Venus, circa 1980, oil on canvas, 193cm x 137.1cm, University of Edinburgh.
Overall, in the abstracted, subconscious form, and in one phenomenally pliable to any number of individual interpretations, Johnstone accomplishes the same feat as fellow artists like Smetana and Dostoevsky - that is, to uplift the transcendent experiences of the soul to a more digestible level of literacy. The full, amplified experience of art within an individual is meant to bring one closer to a state of soteriological release found, perhaps, in a kind of Nirvana. True art may, in the words of Arthur Shophenhauer, prompt a liberation from the will and a transition from beauty’s loss of self-consciousness into the sublime’s moments of self-consciousness.
The loss of self-consciousness deriving from beauty is more three-dimensionally realist, as it is defined by Euclidean principles, whereas moments of self-consciousness deriving from the sublime are more four-dimensionally impressionist, as it is defined by sensations from consciousness. The sublime is invigorated further dimensionally by the depths of passion and suffering. Even if beauty as has been defined, intrinsically, is still sweet in its immediate lightness and purity, the soul is, intrinsically, laden with the currents of many seas and exists on a higher plane than temporality, and is accordingly more authentically brought to light, and so more powerfully felt, by the sublime experience of such impressionistically-nebulous, and transcendently reflective, pieces.
In Johnstone’s “Fragments of Experience”, individuals are temporarily detached from the pressures and structures of their routine and of the physical elements governing their more familiar, heavily-trodden world, and as such, an enhanced awareness of what is really important to oneself, whatever that may be, becomes unobscured in the thickness of earth and time. It is for this reason that the truths underlying this piece are vital to one’s self-awareness and self-progression. Ultimately, by gazing back into the face of “Fragments of Experience”, one sees the mirrored image of the naked soul, in all its equally noble and terrible facets, reflected in a rapturous, sublime, and transforming condition.
Works Cited
Bandstra, Barry L. Reading The Old Testament: An Introduction to the Hebrew Bible. Wadsworth/ Cengage Learning, 2009.
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Project Gutenberg, 2015.
“The Birth of Venus.” The Birth of Venus | Art UK, artuk.org/discover/artworks/the-birth-of-venus-94197/search/actor:johnstone-william-18971981/page/3. Accessed 11 May 2023.
"File:A View of Prague from Lesser Town Shore of the Vltava River 1850.jpg." Wikimedia Commons. 20 Feb 2019, 17:00 UTC. 11 May 2023, 03:33 https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:A_View_of_Prague_from_Lesser_Town_Shore_of_the_Vltava_River_1850.jpg&oldid=339911861
“Fragments of Experience.” Fragments of Experience | Art UK, artuk.org/discover/artworks/fragments-of-experience-94195. Accessed 11 May 2023.
“The Moldau.” Encyclopædia Britannica, www.britannica.com/topic/The-Moldau. Accessed 11 May 2023.
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Shapshay, Sandra. “Schopenhauer’s Aesthetics.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 14 June 2018, plato.stanford.edu/entries/schopenhauer-aesthetics/#:~:text=Although%20Schopenhauer%20is%20not%20terribly,2)%20the%20beautiful%20is%20wholly.
“William Johnstone.” The Scottish Gallery, 21 July 2022, scottish-gallery.co.uk/artists/william-johnstone/overview/.