Daphne, 2009, 8"x11", 21.5cmx28cm, India ink, acrylic, oil pastel on archival paper. Sketch & poem here. Click on image for larger size.
I am happier with this painting now. In it I see elements from different fairy and mythic tales, but she is Daphne. She is composed from my imagination.
Steven said, 'I have only been able to give the picture a quick look. But I enjoyed a strange chilliness – not in a sense of anything emotionally frigid, but something wintery, something gelid, something in the tree branches that suggested icicles. And I loved the eyes. Two such different eyes to have on one face, and both so full of personality. And the way the tilt of the eyes was taken up by the mouth.'
Yes, I felt Persephone, the onset of Winter, as I was drawing her!
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Here is a little slideshow of the stages of the poem painting (click to go to Picasa for a larger viewing):
I love this Brenda. Very Blakean, and to me it shows how writing (and thinking) is an organic process, has a beginning and perhaps even an end; I love the way the branches seem to come 'out of you,' and how an offshoot, bearing leaves, is born from the written word. The slide show is wonderful!!
ReplyDeleteOh, Ed, how beautiful your comment, almost like a poem itself.
ReplyDeleteIt is curious to me if the writing process and the drawing process originate in the same areas of the brain or are they interrelated but different? I wonder if reading an image in terms of a sign system (ie perhaps Vatican art might be a good example of reading images in terms of religious stories or narratives) calls on that "letter box" Dehaene describes in his research the way reading a written language does?
My drawing is often like a calligraphy, a writing, and my writing spills into drawing. The line travels from one to the other. It could be the same line, from the same hand, the same pen.
As Daphne becomes tree which leans into a writing that you can't quite decipher, perhaps a dream writing, mystical, your comment about how it is an organic process makes me think of the Tree of Knowledge.
Thank you so much for your comment. It has set off many sparking thoughts this cold Wintry day in Toronto.
Have a great weekend. xo