Ut Pictura Poesis

An 8x10 1/2 inch pastel of the Caves Trail at Field Farm.

One final quote from Charles Wright:  "Poetry is not a reflection, of course, the famous mirror up to Nature.  It is a reconstruction, which is why style is so important: as you rebuild, you rebuild in your own way.  And which is why nothing is ever 'this' or 'that' but is 'toward this' or 'in the direction of that.'  Rearrangement and reassembly.  Painting knows this.  Ut pictura poesis: new structures, new dependencies."

On the Path

While I work on some larger paintings, I continue to walk the woods with my sketchbook.  The top is from the hill behind the Clark Art Institute.   The snow hid some ice.  I fell down at one point leaving a complete impression of my 9x12 sketchbook in the path, not to mention some other whirling impressions.  The bottom is from the Caves Trail at Field Farm.  Today all the snow is gone.

One of the attractions to the poet Charles Wright is his love for the paintings of Morandi and Cezanne.  In a short essay on Morandi, he wrote:  "If you look hard... you will see that lucidity, permanence of idea and expression, attention to detail and vision, calm and beauty continue to be the true virtues of any art... Art is slow, as Hughes says, and propaganda is fast, and choice is what propaganda erases.  As Morandi did in his paintings,  we should stake our art on the persistence of continuous inspection.  As Cezanne did as well, we should have a "tenderness toward the mundane," a gathering to us of the quotidien.  By concentrating on things that are, we can put meaning where it should be--in direct reconstruction, in the picture itself, in the world as it is when we look at it."

Snow and Mud and Morandi

An 8x10 1/2 pastel of the Sweet Brook Farm barn overhang, and a 9x12 oil of Stratton Road looking North.

An excerpt from Charles Wright:

In Giorgio Morandi's bedroom and studio, it was always spring,
He would say, "Each time we begin,
                                                           we think we have understood,
That we have all the answers.
But it turns out we're just starting over again from the beginning."
Some bottles, a bed, and three tables,
The flowers abounding in little rectangles
                                                                  all over the walls.

Snow Field

An 8 x 10 1/2 inch pastel.  I'm trying to paint what can't be painted.

More words of wisdom from Charles Wright:

"The problem with all of us as we get older is that we begin writing as though we were somebody.  One should always write as if one were nobody, for that's what we are.  In the giant shadow of Dante's wing, for instance, we are nobody and should never forget it.  So we should always write out of our ignorance and desire and ambition, never out of some sense of false wellbeing, some tinge of success.  There is no success in poetry, there is only the next inch, the next handhold out of the pit."

Just substitute 'painting' for 'poetry' and 'writing'.

Truck Route

An 18x24 oil of a corner in Brooklyn, Third and Third.  Sounds awful.

In an interview the poet Charles Wright said:

There’s a very famous—maybe I’ve said this before—Czech photographer named Josef Sudek. He had only one arm. He was a great photographer and he used this big view camera and he did landscapes and still lifes and things like that. He was once asked why there were no people in his pictures. He said, “Well, I don’t know. There are always people there when I start, but by the time I get everything done and take the picture, they’ve all gone.” And that’s sort of the way my poems are. I think of them as being populated with people who are whispering stories in my ear which I then launder in my own way and present, and by the time the poem gets presented, all the people are gone and nothing’s left but the whispers. Once the people go, there goes your narrative.