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– FOREWORD – ‘Five Ways of Being a Painting’ by William Max Nelson was ultimately named our winning entry, and deservedly so. It is a curious mix of the philosophical and the personal, the argumentative and the ruminative, with each of its many modes mutually illuminating the others. ‘It feels larger than itself,’ argued one of the ­judges. ‘It is idiosyncratic in a persuasive way,’ remarked ­another. The deft blending together of the strands of Europe and China, past and present, hiding and seeing; the delicate but forceful episodic style; the intellectual reach – this, we concluded, was a real essay. x
page 13
William Max Nelson – Five Ways of Being a Painting – Five ways of being a painting. Only two of them common. — Reflecting on his childhood in Berlin at the turn of the century, Walter Benjamin wrote that he feared being exiled in things. He often felt trapped in objects that absorbed his being. No longer a boy, he was blue and white Chinese porcelain, the bright pigments of a watercolor set, a fluttering white curtain, or a soap bubble 1

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– FOREWORD –

‘Five Ways of Being a Painting’ by William Max Nelson was ultimately named our winning entry, and deservedly so. It is a curious mix of the philosophical and the personal, the argumentative and the ruminative, with each of its many modes mutually illuminating the others.

‘It feels larger than itself,’ argued one of the ­judges. ‘It is idiosyncratic in a persuasive way,’ remarked ­another. The deft blending together of the strands of Europe and China, past and present, hiding and seeing; the delicate but forceful episodic style; the intellectual reach – this, we concluded, was a real essay.

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