“To tell the truth I can’t explain my art, or even my working methods. It’s like the person who asked Pavlova, ‘What does the Dying Swan signify?’ and she answered, ‘If I knew, I wouldn’t dance it.’” – Francis Bacon on his art.
Seated Figure, 1960
I see it as the clearest evidence of genius when an artist follows his conception, his idea, his principle, so unswervingly that he has this truth of his constantly in his control, never letting go of it even for the sake of his own enjoyment of his work.
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… [Robert] Bresson is perhaps the only man in the cinema to have achieved the perfect fusion of the finished work with a concept theoretically formulated beforehand. I know of no other artist as consistent as he is in this respect. His guiding principle was the elimination of what is known as ‘expressiveness’, in the sense that he wanted to do away with the frontier between the image and actual life; that is, to render life itself graphic and expressive. No special feeding in of material, nothing laboured,nothing that smacks of deliberate generalisation. Paul Valéry could have been thinking of Bresson when he wrote: ‘Perfection is achieved only by avoiding everything that might make for conscious exaggeration.’
Diary of a Country Priest
Bresson, Dir. / 1951
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The artist cannot make a specific aim of being understandable— it would be quite as absurd as its opposite: trying to be incomprehensible.
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When I say I cannot influence an audience’s attitude to myself, I’m attempting to formulate my own professional task. It’s clearly very simple: to do what one has to, giving of one’s utmost, and judging oneself by the most rigorous standards. How can there then be any question of thinking about ‘pleasing the audience’, or worry about ‘giving the public an example to emulate’? What audience? The anonymous masses? Robots?
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In a word, the image [in film] is not a certain meaning, expressed by the director, but an entire world reflected as in a drop of water.
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The function of the image, as [Nikolai] Gogol said, is to express life itself, not ideas or arguments about life. It does not signify life or symbolise it, but embodies it, expressing its uniqueness.
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A book read by a thousand different people is a thousand different books.
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Through a Glass Dakrly
Bergman, Dir. / 1961
I have a horror of tags and labels. I don’t understand, for instance, how people can talk about [Ingmar] Bergman’s ‘symbolism’. Far from being symbolic, he seems to me, through an almost biological naturalism, to arrive at the spiritual truth about human life that is important to him.
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All creative work strives for simplicity, for perfectly simple expression; and this means reaching down into the furthest depths of the recreation of life. But that is the most painful part of creative work; finding the shortest path between what you want to say or express and its ultimate reproduction in the finished image. The struggle for simplicity is the painful search for a form adequate to the truth you have grasped.
If somehow I can, before I leave this earth, combine my absolutely mad freedom and excitement with truth, then I will have done something.
Head I (1949)
Francis Bacon
Oil and tempera on board
The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.- Bacon
Streams and Mountains Without End
China, handscroll (one section),
early twelfth century
El Libertino del Fauno
Pan’s Labyrinth
Guillermo Del Toro,
Writer and Director
Picturehouse, 2006
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A strong visual experience - a film to be lost in … or to find one’s self in. Filled with the essential archetypal elements of story: the secret passage, dark forest, dream within a dream, sacred text, deepest fear, circles and doors, the rite of passage, hunting the beast, the labors...
Powerful storyline and presence of characters. A perfect blending of drama, fantasy, and terror. Superb cinematography. I cannot praise enough this must-experience film.
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According to Ruthe Stein, senior writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, Del Toro’s film resembles visually – and let me add add emotionally – Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937).
Now nobody will want to listen to songs,
the bitter days foretold come over the hill.
I tell you, song, the world has no more marvels,
do not shatter my heart, learn to be still.
– 1917
from my anthology of must read (a)merican poems
X. J. Kennedy
Nude Descending a Staircase
Toe upon toe, a snowing flesh,
A gold of lemon, root and rind,
She sifts in sunlight down the stairs
With nothing on. Nor on her mind.
We spy beneath the banister
A constant thresh of thigh on thigh—
Her lips imprint the swinging air
That parts to let her parts go by.
One-woman waterfall, she wears
Her slow descent like a long cape
And pausing, on the final stair
Collects her motions into shape.
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Kennedy’s poem – and I first encountered it in my teens, such an ideal time – has always struck me as words in perfect play, and in step with their subject – in this case, Marcel Duchamp’s masterpiece, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912) – a painting that rattled the world.
The poem is in constant motion in its language, creating a sharp landscape: toe upon toe, she sifts in sunlight, we spy beneath the banister, a constant thresh of thigh on thigh, imprint the swinging air. We are compelled to see – not just read – this poem. “One-woman waterfall” is exact in its description, and leads to a stop that, like the painting, forever holds its subject in motion. An impossibility – but there she is in the poem – and in the painting.
There’s not one wasted word in this stunning lyric. A pinnacle moment for the poet.
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Thanks to Laurel K. Dodge for posting the painting.
The Moon Woman, 1942
Jackson Pollock
(Oil on canvas)
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A favorite painting - food, on several occasions, for my own writing.
In Jackson Pollock: An American Saga, Steven Naifeh and Gregory Smith refer to Moon Woman as “astonishingly tender and lyrical”. I agree. It has a dark depth, but is truly a meeting place for the human and the mythical. A blending of the erotic with spiritual elements.
Poet on the Mountain Top
Chen Zhou, 1427-1509
(Chinese hand scroll, ink on paper)
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There’s a place of enlightenment. The wind has its own vocabulary. The mountain, its own sense of breathing. You can watch the chest move – in & out, in & out. What you learn there will stay with you. You can try to give it shape with a pen – a story in words and lines. You can describe it, but you cannot write it.
And that should be enough.
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A poem by Cold Mountain – a reprise :
#16
People ask the way to Cold Mountain
but roads don’t reach Cold Mountain
in summer the ice doesn’t melt
and the morning fog is too dense
how did someone like me arrive
our minds are not the same
if they were the same
you would be here
(Trans. Red Pine)
Xu Ling, artist
(Chinese painting mounted on silk brocade)
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For the moon does not intend to cast its reflection, and the water does not receive its image on purpose.
– Alan Watts, The Way of Zen
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Impermanence
To what shall
I liken the world?
Moonlight, reflected
In dewdrops,
Shaken from a crane's bill.
– Dōgen
Self-Portrait, Undeveloped, 2000
Sandra Scolnik
(Oil on wood panel)
Self-Portrait, Three Times, 24.1.90, 1990
Gerhard Richter
(Oil on photograph)
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Adrienne Rich
In Those Years
In those years, people will say, we lost track
of the meaning of we, of you
we found ourselves
reduced to I
and the whole thing became
silly, ironic, terrible:
we were trying to live a personal life
and, yes, that was the only life
we could bear witness to
But the great dark birds of history screamed
and plunged
into our personal weather
They were headed somewhere else but their beaks
and pinions drove
along the shore, through rages of fog
where we stood, saying I
– from Dark Fields of the Republic, 1995
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Understanding the self, an impartial or fractured venture at best, is only possible when one knows the landscape. I move toward creative works that struggle with this dilemma.
Some rivers are so deep, so slow and long ... we no longer remember source or destination.
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Tagged Girl, Oakland, 1942
(from the War Relocation Authority Photos)
Dorothea Lange
