Effervescence, Oil on Canvas, by Catherine Grace

"Effervescence" Oil on canvas completed 03/2023

"Effervescence" explores the inevitability of death, specifically the fleeting feelings of freedom and permanence in a restrictive "evaporating" world. 

Catherine Grace

is an artist originally from Rome, NY who works predominantly in theatre and film. “I am riveted by questions about what it means to exist in our world today. My work often explores feelings of pervasive aridity and emotional deprivation in the human spirit in the face of societal opulence, often drawing on absurd elements that heighten the ridiculous. Through my work I seek to evoke a deep emotional response in my viewer, one that stirs, and perhaps even cathartically heals.”

Personal links:

instagram.com/1catherinegrace

linktr.ee/1catherinegrace

Member of International Existential Phenomenological Book Club, inspired from the Being and Nothingness Series. 

Only Dostoyevsky knows me...

You walk to the back isle labeled Philosophy, pull White Nights off the shelf, slide your back down the shelves sprawling your legs out as you sit to read, “It suddenly seemed to me that I was lonely, that everyone was forsaking me and going away from me. . .For though I have been living almost eight years in Petersburg I had hardly an acquaintance. . .I felt afraid of being left alone, and for three whole days I wandered about the town in profound dejection, not knowing what to do with myself. . .They of course do not know me, but I know them. I know them intimately; I have almost made a study of their faces. . .For two evenings I was puzzling my brains to think what amiss in my corner; why I feel so uncomfortable in it. . .” A woman searching for a book beside you steps in-between your legs, Excuse me, I’m just searching for Camus’s The Stranger.

You know when you read something, and it feels as though the words you are reading came from your own thoughts? That happens a lot when you read philosophy, thoughts you thought no one else thought are captured in literature or philosophical novels waiting for you to see you in them.

© Victoria Venturella, MA, Wait a Meta, Existential Dialogues

Photo from film: A Woman is a Woman (1961)

Dostoevsky, White Nights (1848)

#philosophy #existential #existentialcrisis #nooneunderstandsme

#suffering #deepthinker #lifeishard #literature

#makemeaning #existentialist #loneliness #createyourlife

#existentialism #dostoevsky

If you believe it's possible the world inspired you

Everything we create comes from the experiences we have in the world.

Originality is born from human experience.

The world has so much beauty to show you even in its absurdity.

If you believe it’s possible then the world inspired you.

© Victoria Venturella, MA, Existential Phenomenological Psychotherapist, The Existentialist, Existential Dialogues

#originality

#inspiration #inspire

@existentialdialogues

Running for Time

My feet hit the ground full force. Dodging people and hopping over puddles I only have two more minutes or else I will miss the train. It feels nearly impossible to make it but there isn’t time for thoughts such as this. If I had just left sooner. If I hadn’t gone back inside to look just one more time. As I arrived the train departed as if my presence was a slingshot for its synchronistic absence. Drops of rain hit my forehead. The further the train moved from me the more breath I regained. What once felt like a sinking feeling quickly morphed into relief. Suddenly I felt like I had more time. I didn’t have to go just yet. I could be right where I am. Right here. Right now.

No matter where you were going, now you have time to be wherever you already are.

© Victoria Venturella, MA, The Existentialist, Existential Dialogues