QUOTE (Clearwitch @ Oct 5 2004, 03:56 PM)
It was never proven, nor disproven, that this painting was actually haunted, as far as I know. What do you think? Do you know of other haunted paintings?
I think it is very interesting. I have never seen this one before. One thing I noticed almost right away is the hands beyond the window. One seems to beckon, others are as if they are knocking. Still with other hands there is this sense that they are from beyond the window who are just patiently watching and perhaps waiting - btu some are actually cheering it on. The one in the upper left it is like it is beckonging others yet on the other side of the window to come and watch. That one unlike the others does not seem to be a child because of it's height. The name of the work is "The hands work against him" or something like that, no? That seems to make sense.
I suspect that among a lot of people who are more open to certain influences that some symbology is the same and there exists a common language because of experiences. Here the girl [who turned into a doll] is near a symbol of transition (door, window, gate, stairway, etc) with others beyond. I have seen both the "gate symbology" and the doll symbology. I am sure that others have too.
You can see their hands (works) but not them - they are hidden beyond the window on the other side. The girl herself, who is actually a doll in the painting, seems to mean like it is that she is a shell. That her full self is not here - perhaps she belongs on the other side with the others. But she is the executor of the others' will, and she is carrying this out - which is why she is here.
The artist probably knew what he was doing and painted this picture as an expression either consciously or unconsiously of what he has percieved.
But it might be almost anything that inspired him to do this - a dream, vision, psychic perceptions, etc. If the story about the boy is true, then this painting tells the story of his death at the hands of others beyond and it is no wonder that it is charged. It was meant to be. There is a history of artists using paintings to portray secret things using symbology, shadows, etc. that often they could not just come out and do directly. Perhaps they might not be of this calibre, but I have always been fascinated by some of Franz Von Stuck and Leonardo Da Vinci's works, often only because of the feeling that things lied hidden beneath them.
edit:
I got curious about this and looked it up further.
It might have been posted already but propurtedly this is the artist who created it:
http://www.stonehamstudios.com/Here is his story about it.
http://www.stonehamstudios.com/haunted.shtmlQUOTE
Where to begin? Well I've always had a connection to what Carl Jung called the collective unconscious. I think we all do. Artists, especially visual artists, are barometers for the currents which run through this collective. Dreams are a common experience people may have with this. Anyway, my own experience is a sensitivity to place– physical, geographical place. There are memories, echoes of all the life within a place. Maybe it's what's called channeling. When I painted the Hands Resist Him in 1972, I used an old photo of myself at age five in a Chicago apartment. The hands are the 'other lives.' The glass door, that thin veil between waking and dreaming. The girl/doll is the imagined companion, or guide through this realm.
Still quite interesting to me personally though.
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