Looking at the paintings of the artists I love — such as Bosch or Vermeer — has had an influence on the way I see the world and so on the way I write. Often I want a kind of Vermeer light — that transcendency — and a Boschian “noise.” That savagery. That clarity. That delicacy.
“
A massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness, which, familiar as it might have been in an opaque and forgotten life, now harries me as radically separate, loathsome. Not me. Not that. But not nothing, either. A “something” that I do not recognize as a thing. A weight of meaninglessness, about which there is nothing insignificant, and which crushes me. On the edge of non-existence and hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me. There, abject and abjection are my safeguards. The primers of my culture.
“
Julia Kristeva | Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection