This summer, the Scottish National Gallery is showing Van Gogh to Kandinsky: Symbolist Landscape in Europe 1880-1910 (14 July–14 October).
One of the paintings in the exhibition – Midsummer Night, Nordic Motif, by Norwegian artist Harald Sohlberg – stands out for me. The viewer is high above a dark forest looking down to where the fjord meets the sky in the supernatural blue light of the gloaming.
This arresting image inspired me to invite Scottish writer John Burnside to respond to the exhibition with a reading. There is something equally strange and enchanting about Burnside’s writing, so I was overjoyed when he accepted and more so when he revealed that his latest novel, A Summer of Drowning, was partly inspired by the Sohlberg.
In the Symbolist Manifesto, Jean Moréas defi nes the symbolist novel as “polymorphous; a single character may move about in an atmosphere deformed by his own hallucinations, his temperament; the only reality resides in this.”
With this definition in mind, Burnside transports us to a remote island close to the Arctic Circle. The narrator is Liv. She and her reclusive artist mother inhabit a land of white nights, insomnia and myth, where people appear and disappear, and may never have existed.
Burnside’s conjuring skills immerse the reader in these beautiful, melancholy landscapes and through him the visions of the symbolists live on.
Sarah Saunders is the deputy head of education at the National Galleries of Scotland
One of the paintings in the exhibition – Midsummer Night, Nordic Motif, by Norwegian artist Harald Sohlberg – stands out for me. The viewer is high above a dark forest looking down to where the fjord meets the sky in the supernatural blue light of the gloaming.
This arresting image inspired me to invite Scottish writer John Burnside to respond to the exhibition with a reading. There is something equally strange and enchanting about Burnside’s writing, so I was overjoyed when he accepted and more so when he revealed that his latest novel, A Summer of Drowning, was partly inspired by the Sohlberg.
In the Symbolist Manifesto, Jean Moréas defi nes the symbolist novel as “polymorphous; a single character may move about in an atmosphere deformed by his own hallucinations, his temperament; the only reality resides in this.”
With this definition in mind, Burnside transports us to a remote island close to the Arctic Circle. The narrator is Liv. She and her reclusive artist mother inhabit a land of white nights, insomnia and myth, where people appear and disappear, and may never have existed.
Burnside’s conjuring skills immerse the reader in these beautiful, melancholy landscapes and through him the visions of the symbolists live on.
Sarah Saunders is the deputy head of education at the National Galleries of Scotland
