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The Artist's Muse was recently awarded the "Creative Artist Award" by Laketrees, the noted art blog and resource. Thank you Kim, I am greatly honored.

The Haiku of Painting

Escape by Sharon A. Hart


Recently, while working on a new painting, I’ve been thinking about Frank O’Hara, the late reviewer for Art News and Assistant Curator of Painting and Sculpture Exhibitions for the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Perhaps it’s because recently a book of his selected poems, edited by Mark Ford, has been released. There’s an informative review of the book found in the New York Times.

However, even prior to learning about the publication of the book, I had been reflecting on O’Hara’s poem Why I Am Not A Painter because it beautifully articulates the creative process; the result is unexpected, the process is improvisatory, ever- changing and the final product is found in the process itself which may involve a process of obliqueness or even extraction.

Why I Am Not A Painter

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.


But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.

(originally published 1957, Evergreen Review)

I can relate to the understanding of “too much in the painting”, for the very painting I’ve been working on initially had been planned much too complicated. Once I started painting, the life of the painting directed me to remove certain aspects of the design, even parts initially painted. As the painting was a watercolor, this created certain demands, but I believe I was able to rise to the challenge. Spatial differences, alliances and references enter into the experience of the artist until it is imbued with a seemingly natural expression related to haiku. Sometimes it is in what we don’t add or say that we express the most.


Sardines
by
Mike Goldberg
1955

Writing, Chewing Gum and Bliss

Last week a question was posed on a popular artblog “Why is it so many bloggers write as if they're chewing gum?” Frankly, at the time, I was too busy painting to compose an intelligent answer to the query. However, in the interim, I’ve considered the question and arrived at an answer dissimilar to that held by the art critic who initially asked the question.

It became evident to me that the critical issue is essentially a struggle between the word and the image. George Orwell, in his essay “Politics and the English Language”, warned us that if a writer “is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming…he is not really thinking.”

While the artist attempts to communicate one’s inner vision through the choice and rendering of materials, the writer is forced to use the medium of language. Logos—“meaning” can be derived from both experiences but will be expressed differently because of the media chosen.

Consequently, words, images and logos often enter into battlefields such as artblogs, websites, and even the production of artist’s statements. While marketing gurus encourage artists to take the plunge into the blogging experience, citing the importance of increased exposure, there is no consideration of the negative impact of poorly constructed or maintained presentations when this suggestion is tendered.

One of the other problems facing artists when considering blogging is the very real consideration of how one spends one’s creative time. Does one write or does one focus on one’s principle artistic endeavor?

Perhaps we’d do well to follow Joseph Campbell’s advice,”…. if you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in your field of bliss, and they open doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be."