Disclaimer: The following document fragment is presented from an in-character perspective, it should not be taken as the truth of the setting.
Context: A curious case, a painting seemingly mundane, endowed with mysterious properties. This excerpt represents a sliver of the writing dedicated to this work and speculations about the source of the weird hold it seems to have over the mind.
There’s this term in the art world: Stendhal Syndrome. Named after the pseudonym himself. In music, while some researchers contest the phrase and its academic purpose, there’s Lisztomania, after pianist Franz Liszt. Both represent a sort of inexplicable, if not extraordinary, happen-stance mania before the artistry of Man. The painter’s brushstrokes carry the caress of the divine. The pluck of the string is fingers through an angel’s long locks.
In its proper context, this phenomenon lacks either academic or medicinal illumination. Per the accounts of reprieved enthusiasts and accustomed dilettantes, it’s nary a thing of human make but a touch of beneficence onto the bleakest world. A sort of rhapsodic elation found in artistic presence like lymphatic fluid. This takes us to the matter’s true subject: “A View By The Lake”, an Impressionist oil-on-canvas painting dated by timestamping to sometime during the late 1800s. Despite the painting having been traced to the period in which the associated art movement began, the stylings and techniques used bear little resemblance to any works by its creative figureheads.
Arcane methodology has affirmed that the painting lacks any overt anomalous properties, which normally would also eliminate any further mystique from the matter. But owing to our subject matter, the pretence of normalcy is gingerly brushed away. In the presence of or in the hands of creative creators, the painting has been noted to carry a particular cognitive influence.
A lulling mania takes root. It begins as a consuming fascination that the subject, perhaps now victim, marks as artistic feed. Minding and better scoping out brushstroke nuance and painter’s detail belies a throughway to hysteric creativity. A creation for creating, over and over again. Regardless of style, medium, and size of one’s portfolio, all one makes and yearns to make becomes an obsessive referendum.
The outcome has been proven to be inconsequential. Lurid written descriptors of the presumptuous identity of the scant shadow eeking in from between foreground trees. A dedicated 3-hour and 19-minute video study on the Cubic ethics of the painting’s wooden, probably cheap and brittle wooden frame structurings. Academic musings on where in the known world the lake depicted in the painting lies based on the apparently family or genus of the dense layer of trees which leisurely surround it. The only exception is those without a creative spirit who thusly deign not to create. The urge to create, not the creation itself, is the canvas. Inspiration is the brush.
It is such a strange thing, yes. Is the painting choosing its artistic heralds, or is it something gravely base? Why would anything, much less such a wondrously unassuming painting, have such presence and command?
All I dearly know is that it’s a wondrous, gentle thing for the mind to be upheaved by.
Esoteric Musings... 