Virginia Woolf's Apples: Representational Opposed to Abstract Act

Abstract

“There are 6 apples in the Cézanne picture. What can 6 apples not be?” In exploring Post-Impressionistic characteristics in the visual arts, as well as the verbal arts, the most eye-catching element is the significant form which objects can communicate together with their composition, lines and colours, and light fall. Ordinary everyday-life apples show reality and express and stir emotions. To separate loose items from their environment, or look into the minds of individual people, is to see the world behind the surface, the spiritual world, and to realize that life has different views. This can only be achieved by an interaction between the object and the seer (or reader). Virginia Woolf, the painter-writer, creates her apples in writing and, for the reader, the experience of them is as overwhelming and awesome as was her taste of Cézanne’s Pommes.