Tag Archives: creativity

Some Poetry, Some Art, Some Borges

Maria sleeping

The Art of Poetry

To gaze at a river made of time and water
and remember that Time is another river.
To know we stray like a river
and our faces vanish like water.

To feel that waking is another dream
that dreams of not dreaming and that the death
we fear in our bones is the death
that every night we call a dream.

To see in every day and year a symbol
of all the days of man and his years,
and convert the outrage of the years
into a music, a sound, and a symbol.

To see in death a dream, in the sunset
a golden sadness, such is poetry,
humble and immortal, poetry,
returning, like dawn and the sunset.

Sometimes at evening there’s a face
that sees us from the deeps of a mirror.
Art must be that sort of mirror,
disclosing to each of us his face.

They say Ulysses, wearied of wonders,
wept with love on seeing Ithaca,
humble and green. Art is that Ithaca,
a green eternity, not wonders.

Art is endless like a river flowing,
passing, yet remaining, a mirror to the same
inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same
and yet another, like the river flowing.

Jorge Luis Borges

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“It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.”

 

verses from the poem “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower” by William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams Poem

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Digital Photography at the Aegean Center

The new, Spring 2013, semester at the Aegean Center has just begun… Inspiration and love for life, art and the craft of life and of art is already perfuming our air. This will be my 5th semester of studying Digital Photography with John Pack and I am more than excited about it. ‘Digital Photography’ is just the focal point in John’s class and it serves as a good title to communicate the medium of study. But his class is so much more than that. It is a class of gratitude. It is a class of poetry. Embedded in his philosophy of learning by sharing, daring, caring and crafting, John takes us on a journey where each one of us, and together as a group, acquire the skills and appetite to capture our inner view within a frame of reference, reveal our subtleties by mastering the tonal vocabulary and sculpt these impressions as images on fine prints.

Ah…and this will be a spring journey…!

Just as I embark on this journey, I thought of sharing my Portofolio from last semester, Fall 2012:

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Francis Bacon: The Optimist

“Great art is always a way of concentrating, reinventing what is called fact, what we know of our existence – a reconcentration… tearing away the veils that fact acquires through time.”

Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon was born like today, 28th October, in 1909 and died in 1992. He is probably the only ‘shock’ artist I like. Here is a link to an 1985 documentary about him, his work and his views. I think in this just short of an hour film you can see the man, who claims to be “an optimist for nothing” and to have no thoughts on the meaning of his individual works.

http://www.ubu.com/film/bacon.html

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Leda and the Swan

The story of ‘Leda and the Swan’ is a Greek myth which is told in many variations.

According to one of them, Leda – a mortal queen, wife of the king of Sparta Tyndareus – was in the forest when Zeus spotted her and wanted to make love to her (or rape her). He transformed himself into a swan and landed next to her. They started playing and he seduced her. On the same night she also lay with her husband.

As a result, Leda ‘hatched’ two eggs, from one egg she bore the twins Castor and Pollux (Polydeuces), the fomer being the son of Tyndareus and mortal, and the other being the son of Zeus and therefore immortal. They are known as the Gemini (‘Twins’), the famous constellation, star sign. Through their love for each other, they both eventually became the immortal-mortals.
From the other egg she bore Clytemnestra, famous for becoming the wife of king Agamemnon, and Helen of Troy. No more is needed to say about the importance of these two women in the narrative of the dawn of the western civilization.

All these mythological- archetypical figures and life circumstances have fuelled the human imagination in the millenia and given such great material for the arts…. Here, I think, are two beautiful examples of this:


‘Leda with the Swan’ by Bartolomeo Ammaneti
Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence

20120914-220409.jpg

Leda and the Swan
by William Butler Yeats

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

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“The poet’s mind toils between substance and the void.
Every detail in high and low relief he seeks to perfect, so
that the form, although it may transcend the dictates of
compasses and ruler, shall be the paragon of resemblance to all
shapes and features imitated.”

Lu Chi’s Wen Fu
The Art of Writing

Quote from The Art of Writing

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The Rock is out of its temple

In an earlier post back in April, titled ‘Talking about Art and Devotion’, I was talking about a photograph I was working on, the Rock. At the time of that post I wasn’t happy with my test print. It took me a couple more months of working on it, leaving it aside, looking back at it, making test prints, using different printing methods, etc, to get it to where I felt I liked it. So here it is:

This image was taken using my iphone 4S (!) on a early spring afternoon at the Paros Park in Paros. I processed it in CS5 and my final print was made on a Sommerset Velvet Fine Art A4 paper in Piezo, using a carbon selenium split toning.

I have to say that if you compare the two variations of the same image on a computer screen, I mean the one I have uploaded on the April post and this one here, you might not see much of a difference. The adjustments I made are subtle so the illuminated highly contrasty computer screen might not reveal them, but there is a huge difference in the tonal values between these two versions and, therefore, in the overall feeling of the image on the print(s). I wish I could show you that too.

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“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didin’t really do it, they just saw something. It seems obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things.”

Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs Quote

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Il Postino: La Metafora

I have this scene in my head all day… This scene from the film Il Postino, where Massimo Troisi (the Postman) having discovered the ‘metaphor’ in language tries to capture all those things that move him into a sound recorder. That whole film is poetry….

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“In the struggle for expression of the self, many selves can be expressed.”

Stephen Nachmanovitch

Another Nachmanovitch Quote

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