Posted by Atticus on August 5, 2004, at 20:07:44
In reply to Re: poem ... Meet Me Under the Blue Whale, 1998, posted by Jai Narayan on August 5, 2004, at 15:41:18
Hi Jai,
The more info we exchange, the more I start to feel like we're echoes of each other. What kinds of paintings do you do? I'm very curious. It must be nice to come from a family of artists; as I noted before, in terms of my family, I'm absolutlely alone in that regard. No one can recall anyone in the family history who ever did these things, or had any interest in it. I really started painting in earnest as my illness deepened in the late '90s and I increasingly found myself losing my facility with words; I could no longer use writing as a much-needed creative outlet. The results were just too disjointed, and worse, I just felt no motivation to do it anymore. It's really crushing when you suddenly find yourself uninterested in something you once loved so much. I took up painting, which I hadn't really pursued (except sporadically) since college. It took about a year to finally loosen up enough to make the kind of marks I'd been seeking to, but I found the experience hugely satisfying because I'd found a way to express myself again. The utterly non-linear type of thinking I brought to the canvas worked well with the medium, and I began banging out paintings with the same intensity and frequency, at first, that I've been bringing to the poems you've seen here. Eventually, though, the depression slowly ate away at my enthusiasm for visual art as well. I think when I'm more lucid calm, and reflective, I tend to write; when I'm caught up in one of my emotional maelstroms, I tend to paint. It's very aggressive painting done with large brushes, and I know when it's going well because I can hear the taut stretcher sort of twanging with the impact of each stroke (luckily I have a very large, very sturdy easel, otherwise I'd be tipping these big canvases over all the time). Actually one of my favorite pieces I've done is based on a sketch I did of a young woman at the Cafe du Monde (done on a different morning from the one described in the poem I wrote for you), who was clutching her coffee cup with the sort of nervous, insectile posture of a praying mantis. She looked as though she was pretty strung out -- on what or from what I don't know. But she struck an empathetic chord and now she hangs framed over my little breakfast area. I squeezed blobs of paint directly onto the canvas for that one and mixed them there; I wasn't getting enough texture using a palette. I'm kind of curious about what kind of paintings I would do now if the urge struck. Would they reflect a kind of serenity that's utterly absent from anything else I've ever done? Don't know, but it's an intriguing question. Take care. :) Atticus
poster:Atticus
thread:374327
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/write/20040729/msgs/374503.html