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Stereoptical Study #4, Black and White They were laden with franklins and lindenshields gleaming, with Westland spearshafts and with Welsh broadswords. The berserkers bellowed as the battle opened, the wolf-coats shrieked loud and shook their weapons. - Thòhorbiorn Hornklofi 1 Black ghostly figures painted on a gray stone wall, in a chalk cave somewhere in the desert or the mountains. Misty figures wrapped in dark shawls or blankets coming to a ritual based in strange machinery, coming out of the stone, coming toward us. Or, I’m imagining snow now, an ice crevasse uncovered, and these are figures frozen in the ice, ancient Viking remains, wrapped in sealskin, propped up against the rocks. Look, where the painter has drawn a long red line with a straight edge, dividing the two interpretations. smutty images black ereksjon white cuños but it’s the background that confuses you, the white on black on white, all colors present in white every light can be reflected and then in the black every color in the spectrum now absorbed, we cannot see it could be someone emerging from city fog or wrapping themselves in mists rolling off the bay they come hither, they go back 2 The truth is you cannot say just what these images are images of; in part they resemble things in our experience but mostly not, mostly they are inventions. And what are we supposed to do with that? An artist takes a brush and makes a bowl of green pears on a canvas; now all we have to do is see if they resemble pears, as we have known them (or seen them made by other painters). Then, another artist, takes the same brush loaded with the same green paint and lets an image emerge from the effort to sing an emotion with this brush, this color paint, and this figure. So, now, what are these images the picture of? each brush load of paint has a beginning and end where the paint pushes hard and heavy a broad line lighter, thin and feathery the paint is never something else, never a lake never a hay wain a viewer or maker viewing assembles the view ties a hair’s width of yellow to an underleaf like deciphering a code scumbling a line of which clouds 3 I was questioning why I knew of no white shadows, no black lanterns to make pale silhouettes on the dark walls. The world could have been that way (in some places it may well be that way), the blackness sucking everything into it, absorbing everything. Darkness then might radiate, in turn, in images projected in differences of temperature, the heat at an invisible end of the spectrum burning white-hot roses, boiling skies. See the shadows cut out of black paper, shine the light right through. What about black and white clouds? its complexity is all in the lower right unfamiliar shapes uniqueness in a world sui generis, nothing familiar looking carefully down through the white painted mists there’s another world trying to show through, eager to be kept in the picture like everything else the world being portrayed here is layered. You see what can seen from where you are maybe a bolt of lightning? Charles D. Tarlton Charles D. Tarlton has been writing ekphrastic tanka prose for sometime, publishing several in Haibun Today, Contemporary Haibun Online, Atlas Poetica, Skylark, and KYSO Flash, Review Americana, Inner Art Journal, Prune Juice, Rattle, Blackbox Manifold, Undertow Tanka Review, and Fiction International. Ann Knickerbocker is an abstract painter who has shown her work in New England, the West Coast and overseas; she has been a member of several galleries in Amherst, MA, Essex, CT., Guilford, CT, and Gallery Route One, in Point Reyes Station, California. Ann chose the paintings for the project from her ongoing work (all of which, along with her resume, can be seen online at: Annknickerbocker.com.). A Study in Blue and Pink
Blue, but you are Rose, too, and buttermilk, but with blood dots showing through. - May Swenson 1 Suppose we set out to discuss a landscape by John Constable; there would be representations of natural things to be described - a river, clouds, fields, and, above all, trees. But there are no recognizable things in this painting. Thinking again about the Constable you would find a crucial elements of composition, images arranged to create masses, shapes, and colours, perspective for distances, and an horizon, always the horizon. In this painting, however, there are no distances, no recognizable objects, and though there is a red line, strictly speaking, there is no horizon. What we can discern in this painting, however, are two competing media; the first is collage, with three distinctive but glued-on surfaces here, and the second is paint, which gives us intersecting red (horizontal) and yellow (vertical) lines, the red supporting a rough blue-over-green patch that, in turn, holds down the left side of the red line. a red steel girder cantilevered and blue-loaded floating in the air on scratches and wet scumbling a corner torn from a page collage interests me just the way an old photo album does, moments seized by someone, pasted in everyone holding their breaths among my sharpest memories, none stands out more more vividly than sitting in the barber’s chair looking down the long mirrors 2 The parts that are pasted on, that winkled sheet, what looks like a page torn out of an antique Bible, and last, a fragment cut from of an earlier abstract painting, now disoriented; these are fastened to the blue matrix, seducing it over from the possessive red line. The weight of things in stasis, all of it perfectly balanced, suspended in a field of white. But something is wrong, something is causing the red beam to bleed. the little abstract pasted to this larger one entices you in pulls your eye, your attention from the yellows, blues, and reds its composition does what form and balance should leads your eye away asking what are these images saving the yellow bar for last if these collages had been painted on (they were taken from other paintings) would we then have felt so differently and clearly? 3 It seems a hard thing to accept that the abstract artist, in assembling and applying her materials to the canvas, was not trying to say something, meant nothing in particular. We use a language when talking even about abstract painting that leans heavily on verbs like say, convey, present and represent, evoke, depict, voice and manner, and in the United States we say that, however Abstract a painting might be, it was always also Expression. We mean, perhaps, that it was the artist’s unconscious “expressing” itself or even that making is doing is meaning, i.e., symbolic action. step to the canvas dip a large brush, of the sort used painting houses, into a bucket of black paint and drag a large brash line across the surface now you have your paint problem your dissonance and your suspense. The tension builds searching for resolution with a smaller brush you paint on white graftings, buds to propagate new sights, forms, shapes unimagined color, mingle, and contort Charles D. Tarlton Charles D. Tarlton has been writing ekphrastic tanka prose for sometime, publishing several in Haibun Today, Contemporary Haibun Online, Atlas Poetica, Skylark, and KYSO Flash, Review Americana, Inner Art Journal, Prune Juice, Rattle, Blackbox Manifold, Undertow Tanka Review, and Fiction International. Ann Knickerbocker is an abstract painter who has shown her work in New England, the West Coast and overseas; she has been a member of several galleries in Amherst, MA, Essex, CT., Guilford, CT, and Gallery Route One, in Point Reyes Station, California. Ann chose the paintings for the project from her ongoing work (all of which, along with her resume, can be seen online at: Annknickerbocker.com). Stereoptical Study XX: For Susan Howe
The recipient of a letter, or combination of letter and poem from Emily Dickinson, was forced much like Edwards’ listening congregation, through shock and through subtraction of the ordinary, to a new way of perceiving. Subject and object were fused at that moment, into the immediate feeling of understanding. - Susan Howe 1 In some world beneath the surface, the actor becomes the acted-upon. One possible solution here - the universe of gray, green, and black gradually overcome by the onslaught of red, blue, and white. The imagination must make the leap, must see one coloured plane completing the painting in the other. In a hot enough fire the iron in the hammer melts while pounding the red-lit horseshoe, and sparks fly! Gray of iron; red of flames; chaque pìece de bois knows the sand that petrifies it, each color works its way into another, the insect in the amber, the seashell in the desert rocks. There is movement among the colors and movement is change, animal to mineral, eukaryotic cells to sandstone. once upon a time on LSD I understood the trees. Saw myself looking back from the surface of a shiny, mica stone all our messages fragment that way. The sender and the sent cohere along invisible lines boundaries separating I objectify myself, ruminate on how I, me and myself are simply one, examined from fluid perspective 2 When I look at this painting I see movement and transformation, the right side resisting the encroachments of the left, the darker side. But, in one place near the bottom the wall has been breached, but not as I expected. It’s the lighter side, the word-literate side that has broken through. The torn and smudged notebook page over the menacing green orb. O optimism! O hope! Bought at the price of blood! no easier word to say than understanding long as it’s feeling we’re talking about and not candid verification you might see it as subject and definition then we understand the need for a line between and different complexions paradox reveals our hunger to understand even at the price of cool rationality violating truth to know 3 Constable clouds and a sailboat on a liverish and blood-red sea (on the right side), and on the left, dark subterranean burrowing, something organic that has rotted. A Manichean fantasy, the struggle for the world personified and dramatized. We like to think this way, to see evil as real and still remain phlegmatic. The more precarious our passage, the greater it is, more piquant and lively. there remains a law in our logic that maintains that something and its opposite cannot exist wholly in the single breath you hear something strange then peel ordinary things away, hoping to find some deeper truths, exposing rather, the bleeding tissues its probably better to stay on the surface note colours and shapes accept impenetrable reality, there’s nothing Charles D. Tarlton Charles D. Tarlton has been writing ekphrastic tanka prose for sometime, publishing several in Haibun Today, Contemporary Haibun Online, Atlas Poetica, Skylark, and KYSO Flash, Review Americana, Inner Art Journal, Prune Juice, Rattle, Blackbox Manifold, Undertow Tanka Review, and Fiction International. Ann Knickerbocker is an abstract painter who has shown her work in New England, the West Coast and overseas; she has been a member of several galleries in Amherst, MA, Essex, CT., Guilford, CT, and Gallery Route One, in Point Reyes Station, California. Ann chose the paintings for the project from her ongoing work (all of which, along with her resume, can be seen online at: Annknickerbocker.com.). |
The Ekphrastic Review
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