Hello all!!
Welcome to this Sunday’s Small Salon of the Beautiful and Curious! During this time of social distancing and staying home, we offer a small selection of works from poets and artists who are all members of Daily Kos. Along with their work, they have written some commentary about the selected pieces...how they came to do the piece and some of the process from start to completion.
Please grab a drink, get comfortable and just enjoy yourselves. Your comments on any of the pieces would be most welcome.
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Art and Commentary by mflinn
I’d be the last person to say that painting is easy, it’s not - at least not for me. I don’t have that “natural ability” thing and I struggle with even the basics but I know this much - painting is a hell of a lot easier than writing. Again, at least for me. Further, I am especially unqualified, ineloquent and inarticulate when discussing anything with the lofty tag, “Art”. But, since I am the foremost expert on “what I think”, (even that is kind of “iffy”) I will write. Not about “Art”, but about a couple of paintings.
Those excuses about not being able to write were born when I started to describe “Plague Doctors” and I couldn’t remember specifically what I was thinking back when it was painted. It’s got elements that are easily identifiable - there’s a religious, pope-ish looking thing with tentacles, the iconic plague doctors from the 17th century, a guy with hands full of money and so on. I’m thinking this was an “editorial” cartoon done in oils. At the time it was painted I was an editorial cartoonist for our local alt-weekly and a lot of my so-called “fine art” stuff from those days weren’t too far removed from that discipline.
The obvious reason I included this blast from the past is our current pandemic situation and in the painting I see a lot of the same negative forces we face today, inflicting pain on a symbolic public, represented by the figure in the foreground. Don’t know exactly what was going on back then, (maybe the Bush administration?) but when I look at it today, the painting gives me the creeps.
I would like to note that no element in this old painting refers to the medical community in the least, especially in these days of heroes.
I’m sure a lot of you will recognize the painting I copied to make “Lost Angelus”. It is the great and ubiquitous “The Angelus” by Jean-Francois Millet. It was painted between 1857 and 1859. I will reference more about this painting below because it has a fascinating history and connection to another of my favorite artists, Salvador Dali, but I’ll talk a little about my version first.
We come back to my habit of editorializing in the paintings I make. My inspiration for this piece of opinionated thievery is just observational. One day it dawned on me that everywhere I went I was seeing people inexplicably praying. On the bus, standing in a grocery store check-out line, in a bar - everywhere. Of course, it wasn’t really praying. It was just people using their various devices. Something was nagging at me about seeing this imagery everywhere I looked and it came to me in a snap. When I was growing up in Los Angeles my grandmother had a copy of Millet’s great art framed and hanging in her living room. I must’ve seen it a thousand times. There, in Millet’s quiet study of two people engaged in hopeful prayer at day’s end, was the same posture. It occurred to me then that this was our modern world version of prayer - of giving ourselves, our hopes and our dreams over to Something Bigger. Our New Divinity.
Now, having an idea is one thing but pulling it off is another. I have no real formal training in painting, in fact I’m virtually self taught. I’d never even attempted to copy another person’s painting but I knew it was an art school exercise because I’d seen students in museums and galleries copying masterworks. This was, without a doubt, the hardest thing I’ve tried to do as a painter. I had a very good copy of the original to work from but it took me at least as long to copy it as it took Millet to do the original. It was also one of the best things I could have done. I learned more from this painting than everything I’d done prior to it.
I’ve gone on too long again. Thanks to everybody, stay healthy! M. Flinn
mflinn.com
Below is a direct Wikipedia quote concerning Dali’s interest in the original. Dali went on to paint several versions of Millet’s masterpiece.
"… Salvador Dalí saw a print of this painting in his school and insisted that this was a funeral scene, not a prayer ritual and that the couple were portrayed praying and mourning over their dead infant. Although this was an unpopular view, at his insistence the Louvre X-rayed the painting, showing a small painted-over geometric shape strikingly similar to a coffin by the basket.[3] It seems possible that Millet originally painted a burial – perhaps a rural version of Courbet’s famous painting A Burial at Ornans (1850) – but then converted it to a recitation of the Angelus, complete with a visible church bell tower.”
Poetry and Commentary by hay seed
Rain in the night brings peace
Some primal thirst quenched
The patter of raindrops on the roof
Is the sound of a gift being unwrapped
And the frogs sing their pleasure
As I settle in with a hope
Of a clear bright morning
Lately I have been attempting to write a Ghazal poem, the oldest poetic form still in use, no luck so far. My first encounter with these poems was Agha Shahid Ali’s Tonight, after reading that I was hooked. When writing poetry I usually follow all the rules... that I made up myself. They are quirks more than rules, like never using the word ‘like’, and working the word ‘just’ in, whenever I can. I have been trying new forms this year, in an effort to ease up on submerged metaphors. With all the suffering and uncertainty, we all may be searching for a new way forward. It has been fun reading about the expo artist methods of working. I’ve been unable to describe my method in words, but it may vaguely resemble the junior, amateur version of someone far more articulate. Here is Dylan Thomas describing his method in a letter.
"I make one image—though 'make' is not the right word; I let, perhaps, an image be 'made' emotionally in me and then apply to it what intellectual & critical forces I possess—let it breed another, let that image contradict the first, make, of the third image bred out of the other two together, a fourth contradictory image, and let them all, within my imposed formal limits, conflict."
Deep is the dark
Drawn from the blackness
The well bucket returns
With a shimmering slosh
Color of dawn
Sheet of drawings from sketchbook, and comments — duccio46
Here are drawings of an old girlfriend; meet Sheba! She passed away in 1996 from heart problems. I came home from work one evening and found her. That was almost 24 years ago. Every once in a while now, I think about her and decide to do some drawings. I did these drawings last September.
I made hours and hours of videos of her. She would study the videos and try and perfect her acting abilities, repeating her “performances” over several takes. She aspired to be a Hollywood starlet and spent a lot of time in Hollywood auditioning for bit parts in movies, which she got occasionally and would be on easy street for awhile. She got to know George Burns who would ask her to visit him at his office and just talk to him. Her voice reminded Mr. Burns of Gracie Allen. She was kind of a nut like Gracie Allen, and really funny.
Anyway, from the videos I made, at some point I took about 400 single frame pictures with my camera off the TV and these drawings are from 6 of those. I think that our friends who pass on are sorta kept alive by us when we remember them. If we stop remembering, they cease to exist, again. So, maybe she’s got a little more time being around here now that some of you know this little bit about her.
I wanted to try and get several different expressions in these drawings, and a sense of engaging with her emotionally as she moves ever closer to us in her frame, finally jumping for joy. They seem to progress in immediacy I think, as I became more engaged and concentrated. I always liked Rembrandt’s youthful self-portrait etchings which are mostly him mugging to the mirror and trying to capture his expressive poses and grimaces — they’re learning exercises. These, as drawing tends to go with me, rapidly became character studies by use of composition and light, but I think they also still retain Sheba’s presence, even though she’s gone now for so many years; la presenza del passato.
Poetic Commentary by Justice Putnam
I had a writing teacher in high school who suggested we write about 2500 words a day. At about 250 words per typed page, it never seemed a daunting task and I’ve kept it up ever since. I liken it to training for the Olympics, a way to keep sharp for the Big Work that will come when you least expect it and you need to be in shape to finish the task. I’ve wanted to be sharp when those moments occur. Many of the poems, songs and prose I’ve composed over the years have a planned aspect to them. I never counted on spontaneous inspiration to carry me, often I’ve had to travel to far flung sands and little known back alley zinc bars to catch an inflection of voice and a shadow lingering in a purple lit corner to move me to properly put pen to paper. But every now and then, an explosion of tragedy smacks you right up side the face and you wake up to a knowing that all of the exercise, all those writing calisthenics prepared you well for a piece of work you never expected to write, and wish you never had to.
West Coast Variations on the Death of Sons
by
Justice Putnam
I've had this recurring dream since my early childhood about the loss of Self in a Universe of interconnectedness. Maybe it was watching Sal Mineo freak at the Griffith Observatory in cuffed-jean 1950's L.A. over the ever expanding Universe depicted in the Planetarium there. I could tell, even at the age of five, sitting wide-eyed in that summer night, staring up at the giant drive-in movie screen that Sal wasn't so tough. Recognizing our true place in the Universe will do that to you. Some might react to the revelation in a cool blue hot sun of simmering rage hidden beneath a mask of telegenic knowing, while others might be poor old Sal Mineo, literally stabbed in the gut for exposing his soft fear and latent innocence. In that moment though, he became interconnected with the Universal Mind of his mind. That's how interconnected we all are.
So I dreamed about synchronicity, and I dreamed about Love. I dreamed about dreams and the dream of a life flashing at the moment of death, not my own death, but the nightmare of a son dying in a interconnected universe of bubbles of memory falling in a whirling black hole of no more, forever and ever and ever. Amen.
I dreamed of a generation of children become men if they were lucky, and I dreamed of young daughters left to wander in a stupor for years at the finality of Dad's last embrace and that feeling he is just right there if we believed it. I dreamed of the snow and I dreamed of guns and I dreamed of mothers pounding the chests of their fallen sons hoping to beat a signal in a heart already floating away in the electricity of the moment and of all eternity. I dreamed of that something there floating away at the speed of light and right here at the same time, just as the perfect knowledge of nothingness becomes a pulsar beacon fading and fading and fading. I dreamed of oxygen and I dreamed of fire and I dreamed of a tempest at sea and a sextant lost. I dreamed of stars and worms and laughter and sobbing over a childhood fever and a broken tooth and the sobs at funerals for friends shot dead by the police as sons and daughters watched that last look of "I'm sorry, baby… " just as a last breath escaped into the interconnectedness of it all. I dreamed of a son’s life flashing flashing flashing in an unconditional symmetry of quantum elements humming a beat of supernovas ejecting cosmic plasma in time with a memory of all this pain, and all this love, and all this wonder.
Except, I wasn’t dreaming. I was woke the whole time.
© 2019 by Justice Putnam
and Mechanisches-Strophe Verlagswesen
(Israel Jackson Putnam 2 Oct 1977 - 30 Dec 2018)
Art and Commentary by GlastoSara
Another of my flow on some thin washes and see what happens creations. Definitely the way to go when I have no idea what to do.
It was painted for our gallery's December 2018 group exhibition & reappears every winter. (Tisn't The Season, of course, but this was my most recent e-Christmas card!)
This is a view from the hills north of Glastonbury (based on a photo shot by my other half on one of his extended bike rides around the neighbourhood*). Avalon may not always be idyllic these days, but quite a lot of it is still picturesque! It's my most recent painting, and larger than I usually work. It has a 3-D look about it from certain angles, by the way, which surprised even me.
*(Apologies from the neighbourhood — I may have dual citizenship, but my spell-checker remains unreservedly British, regardless of context.)
I also do portraits, by the way. The following are a half-dozen from an ongoing series I’ve done of people associated with Glastonbury. Some are contemporary (working from photos), some historical (from whatever visual documentation I could find), some legendary (from my imagination). Do contact me via KosMail with any enquiries.
Those displayed in this collection are:
Dion Fortune / Joseph of Arimathea
Geoffrey of Monmouth / Brigid of Kildare
Arabella Churchill / Sir George Trevelyan
The display was in our little gallery, run by a collective of local artists.
[SPACE RESERVED FOR RALPHDOG]
Beaky, artist and children’s illustrator
I am an artist and illustrator. I do commissions from scientific watercolors of flowers to realistic portraits to abstract oil paintings. But my main work is in children’s publishing which includes picture books, chapter books, magazines and educational publishing. I also do conceptual illustrations for scientists through the NIH.
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THANK YOU for stopping by! If you want more from the wonderful Artists and Poets of daily kos, let me suggest a previous boutique Expo published by Angmar. Additionally, 2thanks will host the next KOS Art Expo on Sunday, May 10 at noon Eastern. Please stop by and say hello. Finally, we wanted to leave you with the opportunity to help the Covid Relief efforts sponsored by Chef Josè Andrès and his World Central Kitchen. You can donate to this very worthy effort at this link.