Posts from the ‘art writing’ Category
Crowning the Grand Sow
Painting is the power of suggestion. There is nature and then there is art. When painting you look at something, and then you have to shift your eye to the canvas. There’s a few seconds where there’s only memory to guide you.
It would be interesting if some real authority investigated carefully the part which memory plays in painting. We look at the object with an intent regard, then at the palette, and thirdly at the canvas. The canvas receives a message dispatched usually a few seconds before from the natural object. But it has come through a post office en route. It has been transmitted in code. It has been turned from light into paint. It reaches the canvas a cryptogram. Not until it has been placed in its correct relation to everything else that is on the canvas can it be deciphered, is its meaning apparent, is it translated once again from mere pigment into light. And the light this time is not of Nature but of Art.” – Sir Winston Churchill.
Churchill is talking about painting, say a landscape, and the seconds needed to transmit in code what is seen in nature onto the canvas. I think there is a certain style or look in painting which has been lost because of modern aids like projectors. You lose those moments when you hold a reference in memory. After all, how a painter transmits this code onto canvas (basically how their brain works and interprets visual cues) is what makes each painter unique. A projector cuts out that middle process, creating something more photographic in nature. That’s ok if that’s the intention. But I like the natural awkwardness that working from memory lends to my works. I don’t work from models (also partly due to antisocial behavior) and rarely from finished drawings. I like to hold compositions in memory. This process of recollection and piecing things together is vital to my art. How else to create images a step removed from reality and suspended in time?
There is a monkey whispering in my ear. Is it a devil or angel, perhaps an alter ego planning dark or brilliant deeds? It’s nothing but a conspiring hairy muse. Shakespeare certainly thought it rascally, chiding the idle and absent muse in Sonnet 100.
SONNET 100
by William ShakespeareWhere art thou Muse that thou forget’st so long,
To speak of that which gives thee all thy might?
Spend’st thou thy fury on some worthless song,
Darkening thy power to lend base subjects light?
Return forgetful Muse, and straight redeem,
In gentle numbers time so idly spent;
Sing to the ear that doth thy lays esteem
And gives thy pen both skill and argument.
Rise, resty Muse, my love’s sweet face survey,
If Time have any wrinkle graven there;
If any, be a satire to decay,
And make time’s spoils despisèd every where.
Give my love fame faster than Time wastes life,
So thou prevent’st his scythe and crooked knife.
The Conspirators
The mischievous, elusive muse is a myth which remains with us today. In The Oxford American magazine – yes the issue where my painting “Young Woman with a Cupid” is featured (see post here) – Rick Bragg gets funny and brutal, questioning the idea of the fairylike creature showering us with creative pixie dust.
The accoutrements, the fashion, I can do without, but I have always been intrigued by the notion, the whimsy, that some kind of writing spirit hovers near.
I, myself, have never seen one. But all my writing life I have heard writers speak of it, wistfully, as if it were a lover. “Oh, punkin’, I had planned to write today, but the muse, you see, it just wasn’t on me.”
…
Because you know that some days it doesn’t come at all, the words, and you write anyway, gaining just inches instead of yards, write until you can’t feel your legs and your family thinks that you might be dead.
If it had a form, this muse, it would be a hairy, goatlike beast, something you pin down with a boot on its neck, just so you won’t be so goddamn lonely during this hateful process. And at night, when you believe you are done with it, it bumps and growls from underneath your bed.
-Rick Bragg Laments His Absent Muse
“Young Woman with a Cupid” is featured in Oxford American Magazine’s The Southern Literature Issue 2009, No. 66, paired with “Rick Bragg Laments His Absent Muse.” See it online here. Hits newsstands this week. I’m so grateful to be included among other wonderful artists and great writers.
Young Woman with a Cupid
Here, where the history of writing is so deep and rich that magic, surely, must be involved, the craft comes with a dance card of legend, myth, and pretension. Could mortal men and women tell stories so well? Or, through an open window did inspiration come? – Rick Bragg
So happy to see my favorite novel, As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner, made it as #7 on their literature poll, Best Southern Novels of All Time. It’s been years since reading it, but I remember how much it made me laugh and cry. I’m going to have to get a copy and read again.
I once heard a poet say she never reads novels. When asked why, she said, “Because I always get about twenty pages in and then realize, hmm, THIS isn’t As I Lay Dying.” In comparison, everything else is a bit of a disappointment. – Keith Lee Morris
