Goat Code: August 2018

Wednesday, August 1, 2018

On Painting and Writing

I started painting a little while ago because I had concluded that my poetic aspirations were ultimately doomed and futile. Painting has been a boon and a deeply fulfilling creative outlet, and I continue to learn and to experiment and to stumble upon interesting color and texture combinations. The blog I started in order to force myself to write has become a teeming outlet of acrylics and oils on boards and canvases (canvasses?).

And yet and yet, I am starting to feel the writing itch again, thanks in large part to the stimulation of messy scraping and basting with knives on blank surfaces. I feel that the paintings are trying, at last, to tell me stories, to evoke written images and tropes, whether in poetry or prose I cannot tell yet. So the paintings seem to have become cues or prompts for a return to the previously intimidating arena of the written word.

It also helps that I have also been working lately on some collaborative projects, the first on another blog, where one of us paints and the other writes poems. Sometimes the poem comes first, which inspires the painting, and sometimes it's the other way around. In other words, painting and poetry serve to prompt each other into yet more creative activity, a kind of perpetual motion. Either way, it's tremendously exciting and deeply nourishing.

The other collaboration is with another painter, who paints in a very different style from me. This collaboration is still in a very early stage, but at this point I am painting backgrounds of color slabs and then I hand them off to him to add intricate patterns over the top of what I started. It's a very interesting process.

The common denominator in these activities, apart from the collaboration I have described, is that each one is a form of trust exercise. We give in order to receive. We receive and are entrusted with the care of another person's creation. We give and receive in order to make a third thing, the union of two artifacts into one that contains a dynamic and dialogic energy, synthesized.

I highly recommend creative collaboration as a very satisfying way of giving and receiving dedication, care, and respect, to your own work, to another's work, and to each other's vision of what the synthesis of the two might look like in its final form.

All of this is mostly just to say that life led me to poetry, and poetry eventually drove me to painting, which in turn has led me back again to writing in an inchoate form yet to be determined. It has been a rocky road these last few years, but the arid wilderness seems to be leading me, inexorably and blessedly, to a clearing and an an oasis, a gloriously verdant swimming hole where I can take my ease and survey a new scene with palette knife and pen alike.

Below are two equally inchoate works in progress, small things, 6 inches square, what might in written form be a vignette of sorts. And also, as always, far from finished, but interesting for all that.