Josef Bolf Knows My Mind
Josef Bolf is a contemporary Czech painter who has a large collection of work available to view on his website josefbolf.net His art style punctuates the gloom, grime and chaos of the human experience. One collection stood out to me most.
Paintings of a busy mind
The art seen in the some (not all) features looks like my mental realm brought to the 3D world, it perfectly represents the sensations of a cluttered mind. He managed to paint the disarray of my mental space, a space he has never seen, but somehow seems to be intimately familiar with.
Bolf took the images from my mind's eye and showed them to my actual eyes. Starting with an inky black background, he builds the visual of closed eyes. Stillness. Emptiness. Quickly interrupted by unwieldy forms. Forms of chaos. Forms of disruption. Composed of real life items and feelings, some of it interpretable and some purely abstract. Each form is like an experience that the mind is trying to process, but they layer and pile up to create a chaotic web of emotion and memory. Some forms are distinct, like a prominent thought coming to completion. Some forms are bold, like a persistent thought that won’t let your mind wander too far from it. Some forms are vague and weak, like an interrupted thought that never fully developed; the things not important enough to our brain to fully flesh out, but important enough to our soul to leave an essence of it in the jumbled expression of mind. Some thoughts are clear, like a tree, a horse or a familiar place. Some thoughts are confusing, leaving the mind puzzled; unsure of what it is processing. Each abstraction is like a lingering feeling you can’t put words to. A feeling attached to a memory that you no longer remember.
The vague outlines of familiarity layer and morph and become something unrecognizable, just as you start to sort one thing out it is interrupted by another. The mind becomes so full of things that don’t seem to go together that you forget that emptiness is possible. Just as the black background becomes forgotten as your eyes are drawn to the colorful silhouettes of distant memories. Instead of the blackness having any quiet dark stillness that you’d expect, it is overwhelmed by so much chaos that it seems pointless to acknowledge that it is there.
Reflections with the mirror
Looking at Bolf’s art was incredibly overwhelming for me, but it was also comforting. The overwhelm stemmed from all of the things within my mind that still run rampant. Untamed thought forms constantly racing like show horses: swirling ideas, memories, and emotions that are impossible to interpret all at once. Before stumbling across Bolf’s work this experience was only in my head, and now I can see it somewhat tangible in front of me. Sitting with these 2D representations of something I had never been able to fully grasp before was relieving. It was an acknowledgement to an experience I never knew I was experiencing. I was able to sift through my own thoughts. Watch them come and go. It was shocking to see them so clearly expressed by a stranger a world away.
The mystery structures of my mind were solved. The longer I looked at it, the clearer it all became. All of the whirling thoughts were laid out in paint and ink. It was all simple for a moment. Understandable. I knew what I was looking at and I knew how I felt. I was able to admit my struggle and surrender to it. Instead of trying to grasp the ever shifting shape of the space behind my eyes, I could just sit with a picture of it. The stillness of the image helped me focus. I could see all of it at once or I could hone in on one specific area and notice the texture, the structure, the form, the emotion it brought up within me, the memory connected to that emotion, the reminder that all human experiences have been experienced before.
Despite the uniqueness that we think separates us, we all occupy the same space and feel the same things. Josef Bolf perfectly captured my inner world without ever seeing it himself. He took an experience beyond words and brought it forward into the visible world.