Collaboration with Ann Knickerbocker and Charles D. Tarlton

A Study in Blue and Pink, by Ann Knickerbocker, contemporary.

 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).