Archive for the ‘Transforming Vision’ Tag
Francisco Goya, from The Disasters of War Series (First Edition of 1863) — National Galleries of Scotland
In 1994, Susan Sontag wrote in Transforming Vision — Writers On Art, edited by Edward Hirsch, on The Disasters of War by Francisco.
“The images are relentless, unforgiving. That is, they do not forgive us—who are merely being shown, but do not live in the house of pain.
The images tell us we have no right not to pay attention to pay attention to the crimes of this order which are taking place right now.
And the captions—mingling the voices of the murders, who think of themselves as warriors, and the lamenting artist-witness—mutter and wail.
The problem is despair. For it is not simple that this happened: Zaragoza, Chinchon, Madrid (1808-13). It is happening Vucovar,
Mostar, Srebrenica, Srebrenica, Stupni Do, Sarajevo (1991– ).” Note: The images and captions are meant to awaken, shock, rend. Yet the list of wars continues with Ukraine.
“Here in the words of some of the captions is what they show:
One cannot look at this.
This is bad.
This is how it happened.
This always happens .
There is not one to help them.
With or without reason.
He defends himself well.
He deserved it.
Bury them snd keep them quiet.
There was nothing to be done and he died.
What madness!
This is too much!
Why?
Nobody knows why.
Not in this case either.
This is worse.
Barbaria
This is the absolute worst!
It will be the same.
All this and more.
The same thing elsewhere.
Perhaps they are of another breed.
I see it.
And this too.
Truth has died.
This is the truth.”
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Pablo Picasso. “The Old Guitarist,” Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection.
© 2018 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
I
The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.
They said, “You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.”
The man replied, “Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.”
And they said then, “But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are.”
II
I cannot bring a world quite round,
Although I patch it as I can.
I sing a hero’d head, large eye
And bearded bronze, but not a man,
Although I patch him as I can
And reach through him almost to man.
If to serenade almost to man
Is to miss, by that, things as they are,
Say that it is the serenade
Of a man that plays a blue guitar.
III
Ah, but to play man number one,
To drive the dagger in his heart,
To lay his brain upon the board
And pick the acrid colors out,
To nail his thought across the door,
Its wings spread wide to rain and snow,
To strike his living hi and ho,
To tick it, tock it, turn it true,
To bang it from a savage blue,
Jangling the metal of the strings…
— from Man With The Blue Guitar by Wallace Stevens
Source: Transforming Vision; Writers On Art — Edward Hirsch
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“Live Covering Death” — Image by kenne
Now that I have more time to search for a source of inspiration larger than or outside of myself, I desire to generate creative expression my combining poetry and visual art. It is not always easy to tease out the imagination in words or a visual image, but when combined one may be able to create analogous worlds. Edward Hirsch, in Transforming Vision stated that this process is similar to what Robert Frost called “counter-love, original response.”
The Most of It
He thought he kept the universe alone;
For all the voice in answer he could wake
Was but the mocking echo of his own
From some tree–hidden cliff across the lake.
Some morning from the boulder–broken beach
He would cry out on life, that what it wants
Is not its own love back in copy speech,
But counter–love, original response.
And nothing ever came of what he cried
Unless it was the embodiment that crashed
In the cliff’s talus on the other side,
And then in the far distant water splashed,
But after a time allowed for it to swim,
Instead of proving human when it neared
And someone else additional to him,
As a great buck it powerfully appeared,
Pushing the crumpled water up ahead,
And landed pouring like a waterfall,
And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread,
And forced the underbrush—and that was all.
— Robert Frost
PS: I find inspiration in visual images, whether my own or that of others, from which I try to blend visual and verbal eloquence. One of the best examples of inspiration from visual art is Wallace Stevens “Man with the Blue Guitar” on Pablo Picasso’s “The Old Guitarist.”
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“Morning Sun” Painting by Edward Hopper
Life and art are defined by what lies between light and shadows. In Holland Cotter’s April 30, 2007 article in the New York Times, he wrote, “A certain slant of light was Edward Hopper’s thing. And he made it our thing, hard-wired it into our American brains:”
Ever since seeing Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks” at the Art Institute of Chicago as a young man, I have been seduced by his work — not because he hard-wired my brain, but because of the human ability to distinguish between an object and its background. The contrast between light and shadows catches the eye, which is why Hopper’s work is so seductive — it is the essence of the “Hopper Effect: the impression of everyday life touched with secular sanctity. ”
Poet L.E. Sissman was so captivated by Hopper’s work that he wrote “American Light: A Hopper Retrospective.” Written in five parts, the first part is subtitled “Hopper.”
A man, a plan, a spandrel touched with fire,
A morning-tinted cornice, a lit spire,
A clapboard gable beetled with the brow-
Shadows of lintels, a glazed vacancy
In shut-up shopfronts, an ineffably
Beautiful emptiness of sunlight in
Bare rooms of which he was the sole inhabitant:
The morning and the evening of his life
Rotated, a lone sun, about the plinth
On which he stood in granite, limned by light
That lasted one day long and then went out.
Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks”
Yes, it’s all about what falls between the light and the shadows,
as Joyce Carol Oats writes on Hopper’s “Nighthawks” in Transforming Vision – Writers on Art:
The three men are fully clothed, long sleeves,
even hats, though it’s indoors, and brightly lit,
and there’s a women. The woman is wearing
a short-sleeved red dress cut to expose her arms,
a curve of her creamy chest; she’s contemplating
a cigarette in her right hand, thinking that
her companion has finally left his wife but
can she trust him? Her heavy-lidded eyes,
pouty lipsticked mouth, she has the redhead’s
true pallor like skill milk, damned good-looking
and she guesses she knows it but what exactly
has it gotten her so far, and where? — he’ll start
to feel guilty in a few days, she knows
the signs, an actual smell, sweaty, rancid, like
dirty socks; he’ll slip away to make telephone calls. . .
“. . . People the vacuum with American light.” — the last line in T.S. Sissman’s poem on Edward Hopper.
“There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge…” — Rod Serling, Twilight Zone.
I feel that in the images I capture, I’m always trying to capture that middle ground between light and shadow — maybe Edward Hopper was too.
Some may think of the space between light and the shadow as the twilight zone; I think of it as what the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca called duende, which, as Edward Hirsch has put it, “. . . it makes something visible that might otherwise be invisible, that has been swimming under the surface all along.” Too many more to count
kenne
Between Light and Shadows — Image by kenne
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