poetry and painting

I promised a blog about the place of poetry in my painting practice.

I use it to detach myself from my immediate real experience, to allow myself to enter into a “romanticized” head-space where I can start to branch off into the physical act of painting. I like the experience of being at the seashore, that is not what I am departing from, more my day-to-day human relationships, that which I hold sacred and personal, those boys of mine usually. . I don’t take my most personal to the face of the canvas, but it’s not quite that cut and dry.

Poems are evocative.

Miranda by W.H.Auden Thanksgiving and misgivings is a poem drawing upon the work of the Tempest by William Shakespeare. The play and the poem though are pointing us to the idea of what it is to make art, in the Tempest: The play within the play, and thus ideas of how the play is created. Power, control, all lie in the hands of the artist. In real life this is seldom the case.

Miranda also deals with the idea of the island and the storm, or the calm (mirror) being held on an island bound to a fate, a story… again a good space for me to be in when gazing at the sea or even back in the studio.

I have, since starting to read into this poem gotten lost on quite a little tangent revisiting the Tempest itself (I studied it at Secondary school yonks ago) and then Poetry pertaining to it… the obvious one being Ariel by Sylvia Plath. This work is quite compelling for me, seems at odds with my own reality, in that I do not thankfully suffer depression as she did, but many of the imagery she conjures up indulges my darker moods and frustrations.

I am actually not really in a space where I can get into the studio as we have a guest staying I have made these quick Lightroom sketches (header for this entry) and I have been out at twilight to take some photographs at a local secluded beach I really enjoy visiting alone. here are a few unedited. Its was a real break from the routine to be out at twilight.