Vincent Van Gogh's writing

 Continuing to  marvel over Vincent Van Gogh's descriptions of color in his paintings. As here, in an 1888 letter to his sister, Wil: "Right at the back, black cypresses against low white cottages with orange roofs--and a delicate green-blue strip of sky.... [N]ot one of the flowers has been properly drawn ... [and] they are only small dabs of color, red, yellow, orange, green, blue, violet, but the impression of all those colors next to one another is there--in the painting as in nature...." Painting with words! His writing brings out a lot about his theory of art, obviously.

grasping

 

grasping

 

past the big oleander bush

backing off the tiles onto the lawn

staring at the railing

staring at the terrazzo decking of the porch

through the spaces between the balusters

between the top rail and the bottom one if you

prefer to look at it that way the way the

birds had gone silent

silence the air

traffic on the highway

about a kilometre away bikes

then the brush decorator’s brush

natural bristle

ancient the bristles nicked into at the toe

or torn half-torn away

remnants of paint (water base)

on the ferrule and

on the handle

 

Happy world poetry day

 May poetic creation in all its many forms continue to shine a light.

color study

Buntings

Backgrounds or stand-alone abstracts? I’m still in the early planning stages as to painting but I was surprised by the gray that came out when I used the flash in one of these photos of concrete wall (interior).

Then also any painted version will obviously have to take into account the question of levels of realism and detail—just what amount of detail does one seek, how much conscious planning enters into the project, etc.

So..... I thought it might be a good moment to share these thoughts on the transfer process.

Sant Lluc Art Exhibit, Summer 2015

Sant Lluc Art Exhibit

I’m happy to announce that a painting of mine, "Medley," will be included in the Centre Artístic Sant Lluc collective exhibit for summer 2015. This is the first time I’ve participated in this annual event in Barcelona, and of course I’m very pleased to be able to do so. The Centre’s site is www.stlluc.cat and I hope people will keep the expos plural in mind. Plural because there are two turns, the first from 9-30 June, the second from 7-31 July. My piece will be shown in the July turn, and I’ll be posting more on this as things develop. Visits to the exhibitions may be made evenings, only, from 17:00 to 20:00, Tuesday to Saturday. (No entry charge.)

Virginia Woolf exhibition, London

Woolf Exhibition

            And then there is “Virginia Woolf: Art, Life and Vision,” the exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, London, curated by Frances Spalding. The exhibition catalogue had already been gifted us by a friend, but because of the dates for our London trip, we wouldn’t receive it till we returned home. So the show’s careful planning, the choices made for it, were discovered firsthand, except for some comments by previous viewers which we discovered beforehand, online and off.

            The conscientious organization of the material is welcome given the very full life it attempts to put on display. Then—more than life it is a question of lives, a question of visions plural. For Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell (both nées Stephen) were the prime movers of the Bloomsbury Group of artists, so that any reference to them quickly generates views of their extensive circles. Born in 1882, Woolf’s is one of those remarkable lives that link the Victorian age with the Modernist. Think postmodernist is also modernist—the Bloomsbury group of artists is also postmodernistic.

            In terms of poetry, in terms of vision, “Painting and writing have much to tell each other,” Virginia Woolf tells painting and writing. It isn’t exactly that such a connection was previously unknown. But I think the realist aspects of her fiction grow out of ideas like this. Art and science have much to tell each other, she might easily have said, given the highly allusive nature of her texts. Her references are like those I wrote about here in regard to Julio Cortázar’s “The lines of the hand” (5 March 2014). For that matter, Cortázar’s fellow Argentine Jorge Luis Borges translated Woolf’s Orlando into Spanish. The growing Woolfian palimpsest.

“Virginia Woolf: Art, Life and Vision” shows the chronological development of Woolf’s art, her life, her vision, as they first touch those hazy lines between modernism/postmodernism. The National Portrait Gallery website includes a recording of Frances Spalding talking through parts of it—well worth the time, oh yes.

Cézanne and Mont Blanc

Cézanne and Mont Blanc

Mont Blanc is a pyramid, cube, sphere....

each some form of paper, some kite—

a graphite fragment on pastel paper at noon,

hand moving before the word forms—

Paint has moved them out of fissured

rock—color bursts in the air,

freeing the statue, freeing the frame.

(revised from lines done in 2006)

work-in-progress (detail)

somewhat
too dark ......... (and too small--try again later!)