Revelation

I realise that I keep writing about art and revelations. I'm sorry if it is beginning to sound insincere, it really is very sincere. You see I'm still learning about art, I'm perpetually discovering new things and I'm still learning how to write about it. Here is a revelation, I hope you can feel its weight.

Eric Gill, Ecstasy.

I won't give you the story of this sculpture, because the story ruins it. You aren't supposed to feel this the way Gill did, you need to experience it in your own way. Gill didn't title the work either, but 'Ecstasy' is exactly what it is.

'It was a sudden revelation, a tinge like a blush which one tried to check and then, as it spread one yielded to its expansion, and rushed to the farthest verge and there quivered and felt the world come closer, swollen with some astonishing significance some pressure of rapture, which split its thin skin and gushed and poured with an extraordinary alleviation over the cracks and sores! Then, for that moment, she had seen an illumination; a match burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed. But the close withdrew; the hard softened. It was over - the moment.' Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf

This quotation, from Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, conveys perfectly that feeling of revelation which art can give us. It is a moment of feeling more human, feeling closer to living and life than we have ever felt before. It illuminates the world and then inspires; 'a match burning in a crocus' that is a vision, a beautiful thing we almost comprehend.