Creativity, youth and nostalgia

Artwork of Jeanne BORRITS

This painting has captured my attention very quickly during the Josas 2019 salon in Paris area. Blue and yellow are already a pair of colors that have very high contrast. In addition, it was fixed on a brown wall and lit by tungsten light. I have to admit that the whole scene is very warm and soothing.

Upon further appreciation, I found that this painting is much more than an average still life work. The shining yellow from the flowers and the gentle blue from the pot and the background do provide us a very nice visual tension. However, I invite you to look more closely, since this is no ordinary flower pot. If you’ve done your schooling back in the 90s or even earlier, you’ll recognize that this is actually a bottle of blue ink.

Maybe it is because of my age, the clever idea of the artist Jeanne gave me a big smile. The nostalgic scenes of learning to write with pen and ink came back to me. Of course, we were not just good students who practiced writing. We drew on paper when bored. We created board games to kill time. The most memorable scenes were when the bottles got knocked over. Trust me it happened more often than we expected. Paper, desk and even clothes were turning blue like the background of this painting.

In front of this work, three words came to my mind: creativity, youth and nostalgia. The ink bottle and ink do represent the past. But it also represents the uncompromising creativity of the youth at that time. Through ink, many great things have been made reality ever since, just like the beautiful flower and gentle ocean in this painting.

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