From art to Meta-art (1)
No cultural background at all at home, but an imagination that took her far from there.
At first on wings. A little later relying on own strength.
Leaping horse reveals a very early awareness of what there had to be done, to get where she needed to go: to boldly jump into unknown territory, territory too far away for the others to go to...
10/11 years old: leaping horse
10/11 years old: winged horse
Only 4 years old she finds herself in an extremely lucid state of mind, utterly aware of the fact that painting and drawing will be her fate.
At the same time she is aware of the fact that nobody around her, not even the kindergarten teacher, would understand her if she would tell this.
To make things even more incredible: she knows it is insane for her to be aware of all this at such a young age...
For years she draws and paints ‘just for the fun of it’. Then she meets an older artist who advices her to go to an art academy.
She tries the Rietveld Academy, is not permitted to the regular courses, and decides to take the evening courses.
She is not impressed - to say it mildly - by the art education at the Rietveld Academy, but gets her degree because the contact with the academy gave her artistic labour at least a kind of background it didn’t find outside the academy at all.
19 years old: woman,
made for academy
With a mind overflowing of ideas the road to surrealism was wide open to her. For some years it seems this will be the road she will follow in the arts.
But look in the background of this small painting. There is someone looking at... We don’t know... But he seems to almost deliberatley distract himself from what is happening in the foreground.
21 years old: self portrait with grand piano
made for academy
Somewhere in her early twenties: On the beach, drawing in pencill
Realistic pictures with a ‘dreamy’ absurd content.
But gradually realism is going to fade and a more free figurative painting is taking its place. Still ‘dreamy’, but reality has to step back.
But whatever the style she’s painting in, there is one obvious constant appearing in everything she does: there is always an atmosphere of uncertainty. What, exactly, is being expressed here?
We do not know.
All we know is that there is an atmosphere of expectance. People and things seem to wait for what will be happening in the (near) future.
Very striking: there is always a view on a world behind the portrayed scenery...
Odalisk, oil on canvas
Still life with fishes, oil on canvas
And then, suddenly, there are two works in which we find quite different tendencies. A drawing and an oil painting. In both we find a strong claustrophobic atmosphere; there is no view on an outside world.
Remarkable: in both works there is still light coming from such a world, but it hardly helps to dissolve the claustrophobic atmosphere.
Even more remarkable: there is - literally! - a battle going on between abstraction and figuration.
Marianne Schuit, always intuitively working, clearly found herself in a state in which her mind became aware of the restrictions of figurative art.
Abstraction was closing in from all sides, but at that stage, it did not bring the openness of newly found possibilities, but the closedness of doubt...
Battle, pencil on paper
Woman with flamingo, oil on canvas