In Praise of Face-Plant GuyI’ve blogged before about Pieter…
In Praise of Face-Plant Guy
I’ve blogged before about Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Hunters in the Snow. It’s a famous painting; according to the website of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna where it lives it is “perhaps the most famous depiction of winter in European art.” Bruegel painted it on a 5-foot-wide wooden panel in 1565.
I’m only a sporadic appreciator of art, but I’ve known about this painting for a while because a poster of it hangs on the wall of a ski condo I’ve been visiting since I was a teen. It was only a few years ago, though, that I noticed something cool about it in a Tumblr post that showed a detail of the painting’s ice-skating scene:
This guy:
I thought it was funny, and cool, that in the midst of painting that amazing scene Bruegel included that little bit of physical comedy, that pratfall, the guy face-down on the ice.
I’d always assumed that the version you see above, which was cropped from a moderately high-res online scan, accurately shows how he looks in the painting. I mean, he’s tiny; in the condo poster he’s just a fraction of an inch across. I figured he was just a crude stick figure in the painting, with that big round head and all.
Fast forward to today, when my partner and I were doing some last-minute Christmas shopping at Chaucer’s in Santa Barbara. It’s one of the better brick-and-mortar bookstores still around, and as sometimes happens I got sidetracked in the art section. When I spotted a big coffee-table book on Bruegel I grabbed it and flipped to the part about Hunters in the Snow.
There was a big detail of the ice-skating scene. And oh my god:
Face-Plant Guy!
He’s not a crude stick-figure at all. He’s a rounded, anatomically correct human caught in the moment before impact, his hat flying off as he tries to break his fall.
I can’t help but see it as a metaphor. I think I see so clearly. I think I can reach through the screen and grab anything I want, pull it close and examine it, make it mine, have my private in-joke with the universe.
But it’s an illusion. I’m not interacting with the actual thing. I’m interacting with my idea of the thing. And it’s a crude, distorted idea, more about my own limitations, my capacity for self-deception, than about the rich, mysterious world I drift through unaware until it smacks me in the face.
Face-Plant Guy is me.
Reposted from http://ift.tt/2hpWKve.
Tags: bruegel, hunters in the snow, face-plant guy.
