The Poetry of a Shadow

(c) Karin Jurik

I have written in the past about shadows. But my posts have been very prosaic, especially compared with this beautiful poem. 

If you don't know Wells Mason and Ironwood Industries, you should. Wells creates art, disguised as furniture (my words). His creations are like form and creativity taking wing together.   The Umasi chair shown below is just one example. 

Umasi Chair VIII, Ironwood Industries

Wells recently posted this poem, a gift to him from another artist, Kirk Wilson. I thought it was so beautiful that it deserved to be shared further. And the concepts apply to painting as well as to other plastic arts. I italicized my favorite couplet. Enjoy!

Form and Shadow

For Wells Mason

The form and the shadow

     are form

When the shadow disappears

     it is implicit in the form

Without the shadow the form

     is barren it imagines nothing

When the shadow reappears

     the form and the shadow are shadow

The nature of the shadow

     is the inverse of the nature of the form

The echo of the form

     is the voice of the shadow

The shadow is the form's wing

     The form is the shadow's foot

The form breathes the shadow

     The shadow dreams the form

The form's disappearance

     is implicit in the shadow

Without the form the shadow

     is lost it wanders going nowhere

When the form reappears

     the form and the shadow are form

By Kirk Wilson

2007

The Power of Suggestion

"Cyclamen, Colorful Patches"
12 x 8, Oil on Linen
(c) Lesley Powell 2018
(Available)

My last post drew an analogy between painting and music. Today I have an analogy between painting and poetry.  I've been reading about the French symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé (and trying, mostly in vain, to read some of his poems--thanks to my musty college textbook on 19th century French poetry).  My curiosity was aroused when I saw this quotation from Mallarmé: "To define is to kill; To suggest is to create." 

"Top of Gordes"
Oil on Linen, 8 x 12
(c) Lesley Powell 2017
(SOLD)

Hmmmm. I was reminded of a common saying among painters, used when one over-works a painting. When you have a fresh, lively painting started, and then you fuss and fuss over it until you have completely zapped the life out of it,

Art with a Will of its Own

Robert Frost

I recently re-read Robert Frost's wonderful essay, "The Figure A Poem Makes". I was struck by how much of what Frost says about poetry also pertains to visual arts, and especially to painting. Frost speaks of a poem as a living thing, one that "finds its own name as it goes".  The idea of an artwork as an independent being--something with a mind of its own-- is so striking. I think Frost would say that the poet is caught up in the poem, and that the poem is leading the way (not the poet).

Richard Diebenkorn
from his Ocean Park series

I know it's an unlikely comparison, but as I read Frost, I could not help but think of Richard Diebenkorn's remarks about painting. Diebenkorn said "I don't go into the studio with the idea of 'saying' something. What I do is face the blank canvas and put a few arbitrary marks on it that start me on some sort of dialogue." This comment suggests that, like Frost, Diebenkorn sees the art as having a life of its own--it is the other party to the dialogue.

I think that Diebenkorn would also agree that what Frost calls "the wonder of the unexpected" is what fuels the artistic process. For example, Frost writes that a poem "discovers the best waiting for it in some final phrase at once wise and sad..."  Ah yes, that moment of discovery at the end. Is there a painter out there who has not struggled at length with a painting, and only at the very end come upon the stroke that brings the entire work to fruition?

I will conclude with the last few sentences of Robert Frost's essay. "Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting. A poem may be worked over once it is in being, but may not be worried into being. Its most precious quality will remain its having run itself and carried away the poet with it. Read it a hundred times: it will forever keep its freshness as a petal keeps its fragrance. It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went."

Don't you wish we could all create art like this!?!