i attended an art photography workshop a few weeks back. we were asked to bring one or two paintings to take pictures of, and i took along this small painting...
i used daylight studio lights and reflectors to take this picture [with a camera on a tripod!], and i was also guided in some post-processing in photoshop [i have only cropped it as it came out pretty close, i think - well, i took quite a few test shots to try out some camera settings].i selected this small painting for the workshop because there are no obvious figurative elements and the colours are quite dark and muted, and i thought this would present a good challenge from which to learn a few things.this painting is one of my many experiments at painting a sense of the sea, and it makes me think about surfing and pictures of the inside of waves, as there is no shoreline or horizon to orientate it. it is quite disorientating [to me now] as i was trying to evoke a sense of movement and depth, emerging and submerging, crashing waves, under water, or resurfacing - all on a flat surface - and i'm not sure that it really 'works' - it could be anything [the allure of painterly abstraction] - but i gave it a shot anyway.i think i was feeling quite depressed at the time of painting it.
coming home
They take away our belts so that we must holdOur trousers up. The truly mad don’t botherAnd thus are oddly hobbled. Also our lacesSo that our shoes do flop about our feet.so begins Anthony Hecht’s poem ‘Coming Home’ [1976], a creative retelling of the English poet John Clare’s escape from an asylum house in Essex back to his ‘homeland’ in Northamptonshire, in the summer of 1841 [from John Clare’s journals].but what connection does this excerpt from a poem have with a bright blustery morning in early may?well, out of the blue, the picture editor of The Times Literary Supplement [TLS] contacted me and asked if they could use a picture of mine to accompany a poem by John Clare as the ‘Poem of the Week’.the request was for something “wild and woody”, as they liked my ‘Clare inspired’ sketchbook paintings in this journal [blog]. i hadn’t conceived of these painting sketches as outwardly ‘clare-inspired’ but i had, in a curious inversion, quoted a couple of lines from John Clare’s poem ‘The Progress of Rhyme’ to accompany the sequence of paintings from some muddy and muted days in winter.maybe it was something to do with seeking hope, on the horizon, escaping to the country, side-tracked, down a country lane, a nearby hill, the corner of a field, or down on the marsh - all reflected back in jaded eyes. an overwhelming sense of 'enclosure' in these agricultural landscapes could make anyone go a little stir-crazy after a while, but in John Clare's poem i was reminded that sometimes it’s small nature that grasps and grounds you. one can easily ramble on about these things, it’s a common side-effect of the ruralist condition.‘the progress of rhyme’ is, as the title suggests, a poem about poetry: nature as muse, his enduring love for 'poesy’ as he terms it, intertwined with memories of past acquaintances, the indifference and fickleness of others, finding beauty in weeds, uplifted by birdsong - “cheer-up cheer-up cheer-up”, solace and joy in nature. it goes on. & on, & on [with quite a lot of curly ampersands en route]‘the progress of rhyme’ is also a poem that requires repeated reading, not only because it is quite long and there is a quirky dialect to be deciphered in the words, grammar and spelling, but because with each reading a short rhyme might chime out with new resonance.whenever i take time out to skim through the two books of John Clare’s poems i have, there is always an interesting pause for thought in the wider narrative. maybe this is the nature of poetry - you read what you need - as i must confess i have not yet read all of the poems, nor have i fully comprehended them in the academic literary sense.but i must get back to the original back-story, for this is not about 'the progress of rhyme', but another poem…in reply to the enquiry from the TLS, i sent them pictures of five landscape painting sketches for consideration, not knowing which John Clare poem they might be associated with. naturally, i was flattered by the picture request even though no fee was involved, as i like john clare's poetry, and oddly, maybe it would be some good exposure for a hermit artist [i'm not really a hermit, it just appears that way in comparison to other artists' lives].then a small muddle-up occurred as it transpired that the ‘poem of the week’ wasn’t going to be a John Clare poem after all, but a poem inspired by Clare’s ‘Journey out of Essex’. i had not previously heard of the poet Anthony Hecht, but have discovered via the wonder of the worldwide web he is/was a prestigious american poet [now deceased]. i was still happy with the picture agreement.i later emailed a friend who has more literary connections - they have worked in graphic design & book publishing, and are currently working on illustrations for a new book of poems - and i said that i found it unusual that a small wintery bleak painting of mine was chosen to illustrate a journey taken in summer time. they replied: he sleeps in ditches. this sounds reasonable, but i wouldn't want my painting to be interpreted that things had got that bad. in any case, ditches can be beautiful in summer, overgrown with the tall, swaying fluffy-ended stems of meadowsweet.after re-reading the poem, the contrast made more sense: John Clare’s escape from the mental asylum to a place called home, as reinterpreted by Hecht in ‘Coming Home’, is a solitary and inhospitable journey: he travels wearily “by the dark of night”, the trees in the landscape are “unimaginably black and flat” against the grey sky, puddles are “flagstones of silver”, he goes hungry, takes a nap in a ditch, is “troubled by uneasy dreams”, forgets he has a wife and child, and still holds on to the hope that when he arrives ‘home’…here is the link to the full poem mentioned at the beginning, 'Coming Home' by Anthony Hecht, in The Times Literary Supplement: [http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1552228.ece]some other sources of information found on the internet this week:Interview: Anthony Hecht, The Art of Poetry N0. 40, the Paris Review: http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2487/the-art-of-poetry-no-40-anthony-hechtJohn Clare Cottage, Helpston: http://www.clarecottage.org...[note to self: there are probably some inconsistencies in using capitals, with regard to my usual ‘house style’ of typing][another thought: as a result of the general election here in the UK this week, a cloud of despondency has descended upon the liberal and left-leaning voters of the population. five more years of austerity. any analogy will do….]
lost in translation
it took me twenty four hours [well, three days] to finally decide on a title for this piece… which translates timewise as eight hours per word, or one hundred and two minutes per letter, four hours per vowel, three hours per consonant.titling art [paintings] can be a tricky and solitary task - well, if i could say it in words...i also had to write some other words to go with the title words. i thought about it all day on sunday. some thoughts completely take over your headspace, the more you try to refine them the less sense they seem to make. incorrigible.a weekend lost in my own world of translation. wordblock. grasping at floating fragments of thoughts, ideas, words, sounds, meanings, coaxing them out of retreat, trying to make them perfect...the 'show & tell' with Artworks was helpful, and always fascinating and exciting to see what the other artists have done. it was suggested i read some Pablo Neruda poetry, which subsequently got me thinking about the issues in reading poems in translation.i found this archived article, The Poetry of Neruda [october 1974] on The New York Review of Books website an interesting read....Para que tú me oigasmis palabrasse adelgazan a vecescomo las huellas de las gaviotas en las playas.So that you will hear memy wordssometimes grow thinas the tracks of the gulls on the beaches.*that's the beginning of the poem Para que tú me oigas [So that You Will Hear Me] by Pablo Neruda, translation by W S Merwin in 'Twenty Love Poems and A Song of Despair' [Penguin Classics 2004]* interestingly, Google Translate translated it as this:For you to hear memy wordssometimes grow thinas the tracks of the gulls on the beaches.