Spontaneity, Monotony, and Uncertainty By: Giulia Weeda

My project is a visual representation, drawing from the images and themes in Endgame by Samuel Beckett, of the before, during, and after of our current reality. The descriptions within the dialogue of the play informed the original concept of my idea, specifically the scene out of the left window. An “ocean” with “lead” waves and “zero” sun was an image that stuck in my head throughout my reading, and my project was originally going to be a stand-alone representation of the sea (Beckett 39). I had pictured a watercolor painting that was completely free, perhaps an abstraction of the description with no boundaries or restrictions. However, the more I thought about why this play matters, especially now, I could not bring myself to leave out the eerie similarity between the characters’ confinement and isolation and the confinement and isolation that everyone around the world is experiencing.

So, instead of a standalone painting, I have created a series of three visuals that go together. To start simply, they represent the left window, the room, and the right window, and they match the chronology of current times, with the sea being before the pandemic, the room being now, and the blank page being the future. As I created each, though, I wanted the form and the process to match the feelings that they encompass, both in the play and in our realities.

The left window looks out to the ocean with leaden waves and a grey sky. While later the sea is described as “very calm,” the wilder image on page 39 better fits the comparison with how we lived before this pandemic (Beckett 73). There was a sense of freedom and invincibility, and if the waves represent the people, we were all crashing into one another with tremendous force. We were moving around freely, thinking that there were no boundaries and that nothing could stop us from carrying on with our plans. Even though individuality and uniqueness was touted as the only authentic way to exist, it seemed that most people had this mindset. I used watercolor in varying shades of blue to represent this idea in the painting. Upon a closer look, though, it becomes clear that even though we lived like there were no boundaries, there actually were quite a few. A number of factors worked to keep us confined in a unified, working society. In the process of making the painting, I used masking fluid to map out the structure of the pattern and then peeled it away at the end to reveal the white lines, keeping the watercolor in check.

The room is modeled after the set design of the production of Endgame that we were supposed to see at the Old Vic in London. The similarities between the situation of Clov, Hamm, Nagg, and Nell and the situation that we find ourselves in are easy to point out. They are stuck in a room. We are stuck in our homes. They do not know when they will leave. We do not know when we will leave. They seem to have the same conversations and arguments every day. And most of us are starting to feel the monotony of isolation, too. The last piece is the reason why this drawing is done in the style of pointillism. The entire drawing is made from tiny dots; there are no lines, solid bits of color, or anything else-- just dots. As you can imagine, this process was extremely monotonous. What would have taken me maybe an hour if I was drawing and coloring normally took me more than 14 hours to complete, broken up over a few days due to the mind-numbing-ness of the technique. I used 0.3mm and 0.4mm pens to further turn my hand and brain to jelly, and my goal was for that to come across in the finished product. These individual dots represent the monotony of this experience, and even though there may be a bit of variation in color, size, and closeness to one another, they all blend together from a distance, just like this season of our lives probably will when we look back on it in the future.

Finally, the third piece in the series is a blank sheet of paper. Even though there are a few descriptions of what may be out of the right window in the play, such as the potential presence of a “small boy,” it is overall quite unknown (Beckett 87). Just like Clov longs to leave the room and venture into the outside, many people are looking forward to the end of shelter-in-place and social distancing, but no one knows what that will look like. This situation has left many people without employment, it has changed the general perspective about what is “essential,” and it has exposed many of the physical and mental structures in our society that are not beneficial. Even though there are many different guesses, no one can really know what will happen across the world in the near future, and a blank page seems a fitting representation of that.

Endgame matters, then, because it can give us a way to think about what is happening right now. Even though the details may be different, it still gives us an option to think about when trying to contextualize this experience, and it even offers us a safe, separate-from-reality space to think about possible conclusions to this situation. One common hope for the future right now is that we will come out on the other side of this stronger together, and there is an even more pressing hope for us, as Hamm says, “To think perhaps it won’t all have been for nothing” (Beckett 41).

Works Cited

Beckett, Samuel. Endgame & Act Without Words I. Grove Press, 1957.