The island of happiness
Mari Saat

	Ever since childhood I have been convinced that it is only necessary to see a part of a human body - a leg or perhaps just one finger, and it will be possible to picture the person's face, and not only the face, but his whole body and maybe more - the course of his life... I have occasionally followed a woman in the street and tried to imagine her character by her calves (at that time women still wore dresses and high-heeled shoes so their calves were open for inspection). Men always had long trousers, and children's calves were not very revealing - mostly like sticks, baggy stockings twisted around them...). I cannot remember having ever been really successful in my imagining, but I still stick to this belief - not only regarding calves, but about the work of an artist as well. Other people, not involved in making art, have also noticed this. My mother, for instance, often complained that people in paintings did not look like themselves, but resembled the artist who had painted them... Who dares to doubt this should insert a Lucas Granach woman into a picture by Murillo or Jüri Arrak, and see what happens! The same should therefore be true for the portrait of Karin Luts: it should inevitably reflect her essence. Regarding it now (Self-portrait, 1939) not as a work of art, but as her calf or a photograph, it should reveal her whole being, her life story, even her other pictures... The first sensation I have about this picture is alienation. The kind of alienation I have felt since childhood toward people with this type of face, be they small girls or adults. Also toward the colours in this picture. Nothing in this picture appeals to me - not the colours, greenish-yellow hues, bitter as bile; not the smoothed back hair clinging to the head and ending in a thick hairnet; not the heavy lids, with arrogantly evaluating glance underneath; not the haughtilyironically compressed lips; not the strong neck; not even the collar cut of the jacket, to say nothing of the grimy brownish- reddish-yellowish tones of the fabric - I like nothing, including the spot on the chin.
	But wait! My impression does not reflect, or does not only reflect, the nature of Karin Luts, but my own attitude to her essence - so this evaluation in fact contains two essences, mine and hers... Maybe this is what prevents me from getting any further in all my guesswork of this kind, as my own attitudes and preferences keep interfering... Continuing to stare at the picture, forcing myself to be calm, forgetting the rush, not noticing other things in the range of vision, what strikes the eye again and again is the spot on the right side of the chin - what does it suggest to me? - honesty! It would have been easy to lose it under the brush. Probably all photographs, from her younger or older years, show a more beautiful woman than in this portrait. And it seems to me that compared with this portrait the photographs all lie or at least conceal... To pursue further, her mouth - the way the lips are compressed and the corners turn upwards - does not necessarily express arrogant mockery, but instead a firm, selfish wish to realise herself. And the glance under the half-lowered lids is that of a professional, used to evaluate and determine... By the way, when I look at the picture from a distance, eyes squinting, I see a marked dark furrow, a shadow that runs from the right nostril upwards around the upper lid and also shadows the lower one. That furrow, between the nose and the eye, that dark curve, seems to express sadness... Looking at everything from a distance, eyes wide open, this line and the whitish-pink glow of the flat surfaces of her face - together they seem to shape destiny... And the background, globefloweryellow and celestial blue glimmering through the bile green - like a yearning behind the furrows painted into the face. I am not a magus, and I cannot foretell destiny. Besides, everything I have said earlier could be nothing but speculation. Because, firstly, speculation is easy when you have the picture and a book at hand that tells the life story. And secondly - when you stare long enough at charcoal or a whitewashed wall, you will soon distinguish all sorts of weird figures and signs there. But you can never be sure what is speculation and what is reality... When I look at the works of Karin Luts at length, they interestingly seem to divide in two: some works, and they are the majority - or at least they are more influential - express the external that she sees and describes; others are hidden inside her and exude their gleam only occasionally. The latter are purer, bluer and more lucid and they contain a sailor, the sea, a boat... I cannot rid myself of the feeling that deep inside there was no man or woman, not even a painter, but only a sailor - a seafarer in the most general sense of the word. This, too, can naturally be no more than speculation, caused by the fact that I discovered her pictures of sailors at more or less the same time that I read how she spent two day in a refugee boat floating in the open sea before reaching Sigtuna, because the boat engine had broken down... Considering this chance knowledge, these sea and sailor pictures should reveal a sense of danger, something gloomy. But they don't, at least not to me. I imagine a sailor whose home is a small islet roaming the seas, from where he occasionally travels to a harbour of real land. There he sees sickening pictures, coarse people, in mustard yellow, poison green, brown and grey shades; and occasionally also in pure bright colours, but nevertheless somehow alien, external... The sailors just about to land on their island (The Island of Happiness, 1926), of similar build and features like twins. They both surely are her? Karin Luts (1904-1993), the first female painter in Estonia to win recognition. After having successfully graduated from the art school she went to Paris to complement her knowledge and skills in 1928. Having come back she became an appreciated and original painter by mid-thirties. In 1944 she fled to Sweden that remained her home for the rest of her life. Karin Luts was one of the few Estonian artists who tried to break out of the narrow circle of exile and to contact Swedish art life. She won international recognition with her coloured prints in the late 1960s Mari Saat (1947) studied economy at the Tallinn Technical University. Presently lecturer of business ethics. Has published fiction since 1971. Two latest books are the novel In the Winds of Blue Heights and a collection of essays The Solitude of a Dying Person
	| Estonian Art 1/05 (16) | Published by the Estonian Institute 2005 | ISSN 1406-5711 (Online) | ISSN 1406-3549 (Printed version) | einst@einst.ee | tel: (372) 631 43 55 | fax: (372) 631 43 56 |