#35 – L’homme-loup de Meenkwiese
January 2016
Acrylic on canvas (1m x 1m)
It took me a while to accept this painting in my life. I hid it for a long time from public view and did not display it on my website either. This painting was truly a healing experience for me, very intimate as well.
One day, I took all the courage that I could gather to put onto the canvas an experience that left me quite traumatised in 2009. I had just moved into the flat where I now live with my family for a few days. I was 6 months pregnant and had to go down into the cellar with the caretaker to read the electricity meter. There were (and still are) a couple of heavy doors to get to that room. I‘ve never liked cellars, particularly dark ones, so I was not at ease to start with. The caretaker who had the key to the normally locked meter room was surprised to find the door unlocked. When he opened it and was about to turn on the light, an almost 7-foot tall and large silhouette suddenly emerged from the darkness, a huge mane of matted black hair hiding most of the face. The light from the corridor startled the man who came out of the darkness, he looked around with piercing blue eyes, trying to find an exit, almost like a trapped animal. He literally escaped from the room, shuffling past us into the corridor, grunting in a very low wolf-like growl, leaving absolutely no trace behind him except for the stench that his body emanated.
The man had been sleeping in the windowless room in total darkness on the bare concrete floor and we had woken him up abruptly when opening the door. Something in me startled and my belly contracted. Had my baby felt my fear deep inside? I stood motionless for a few seconds, looking totally shocked at the caretaker, feeling nauseous and wondering if I had just had an hallucination. The caretaker was also visibly shaken, so I had not been hallucinating. We mumbled a few words to each other to try and recover from the experience and get on with our business of measuring the meter.
I don‘t remember clearly what happened after that and how I reacted. Except that I didn‘t want to go back to the cellar as long as I was pregnant. If I went downstairs with my partner, I felt a shudder when passing by the room, holding on to him, expecting the door to abruptly open. Of course, nothing ever happened. After a few months, my fear diminished and I started to feel more confident about going on my own downstairs, my reason telling me that it was just a one-off thing and all was ok now. When I walked past a homeless person in the months that followed, I tried to see if I could identify the man who had almost trapped himself in that room. I never found him.
When I started to face some of my fears while painting, I decided to consciously face the fear that I had felt deeply in my core when seeing the „Wolf-man of Meenkwiese“ as I now nicknamed him. At first, the fear almost blocked my hand to put colour on the canvas. I felt as paralysed as I had when this man had walked past me. It was a kind of slowly replay of the scene and I suddenly vividly remembered his piercing blue eyes in the middle of a very dirty face. When I started to paint, a wave of grief penetrated my heart and I truly felt for that man who seemed to have lost so much of his humanity. Tears started rolling down on my cheek as I felt compassion for him and his sad fate. The fear was gone and then in the middle of the painting appeared a Christ-like face in deep prussian blue, a rough and emaciated face with dark blue matted hair and beard which I was now facing without fear, a teardrop showing on the canvas, as if my tears had melted with his. I let the painting rest, feeling a deep connection with that face which like by magic – the magic of painting – no longer scared me.
I don‘t know what drove me to add the next layer of dark green strong strokes, reminiscing of the jungle. It felt like I was giving this „Wolf-man“ figure its place back in the wilderness. In the final layer, I created a fire with color – as if I was burning the old fear and giving this figure a sacred fire, allowing a dark phoenix to rise from its ashes, adorning it with a crown. Turning it almost to a Shiva deity.
Painting this experience ended up having a deeply healing quality for me. Painting this canvas allowed me to feel my pain, to connect with human suffering and to find more compassion inside myself. I‘ve grown to love l‘Homme-Loup de Meenkwiese. I don‘t feel that I need to hide this painting anymore as I‘m more at ease with the darkness in my own life.