Landscape of Rats and Garlic

Dorothy Koppelman wrote about this painting in a talk on “Light and Dark, Hiding and Showing in J.M.W. Turner”:

“In an Aesthetic Realism Art Inquiry of 1967, those lessons in which Eli Siegel taught me what my deepest intention as a person and an artist is, and for which I will be grateful for the rest of my life, this painting, Landscape of Rats and Garlic, was discussed. I described the painting this way: “The thing that took me so much was that the shape of the white garlic and the grey rats are the same, but a rat can want to go in, to vanish speedily, and the garlic with that smell, obviously comes forward, and I wanted to have them cast up by the sea, in the open, under the sky.”

“Mr. Siegel asked me, ‘What do you think of garlic? It happens that many persons who like to recede deeply are fond of spicy things. Would you say your love for garlic was in the whole world, for the whole world? —Is it sunny or is it furtive?’ And Mr. Siegel asked me what I wanted in my life: ‘What are you for—gusto or recession? What is your message in this painting?’

“Mr. Siegel saw what I wanted: ‘to show both shame and triumph in the open, to study pride and disorderliness.’ Through questions such as these I have been able better to distinguish between the two desires that fight in all people: the desire to have contempt for things and to vanish; and the desire to see them with form.

“In Aesthetic Realism consultations now, because we ourselves have been asked liberating questions like these we can gratefully ask about the “reality question of the luminous and the hidden” in a person’s life, as Eli Siegel describes it in Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites? The pleasure of seeing opposites as one, in being asked questions so that one can see this, is the only rival to contempt; it can also lift the burden of shame. We know this for ourselves; and we have seen it happen.”

“Light and Dark, Hiding and Showing in J.M.W. Turner” by Dorothy Koppelman

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