Quick Updates!

Regarding poets who paint, etc., my colleague Professor Nimura has reminded me that, yes, indeed, e.e. cummings painted as well as wrote, and she has sent along a link:

http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/cummings/paintings.htm

And another blogger (regarding "Out Here") noted that, yes, we may or may not be meant to work in relative obscurity, but it's still nice to share. Indeed. It did make me think of Dickinson, among others, however, who seemed to have an inkling that her work would be shared--except later, when she was Elsewhere. I think she might have capitalized Elsewhere, too.

(How great would it be if Dickinson returned and wrote a blog? The posts would be terse and completely original. She'd make the genre her own.)

I may have to get serious about this and develop a real list of poet/painters and painter/poets.

But not tonight. I have sleeping to do before I go more miles.

Anyway, thanks for the info/input.

Poets Who Paint, Painters Who Write

(image: painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti)

I've never had an art-lesson, and it shows. But I've been trying to paint and/or draw for decades. A few things have turned out okay, including an acrylic painting of a doe and a fawn, wherein the doe's backside faces the viewer. People seemed amused by that choice. I did some really weird facial caricatures in chalk-on-paper that make me laugh. I show them to almost no one. Then I did this big smear-paint-on-canvas thing, dominated by red, and I didn't think much of it (and still don't) and would have kept it in hiding except people with whom I live liked it enough to hang it--on the wall, I mean. This comes under the category of "go figure." I'm also an inveterate doodler, especially in meetings, and especially if I know where the meeting is heading. While I'm waiting for it to get there, I doodle, mostly faces, not faces I'm looking at, just faces.

Karl Shapiro painted a bit, I think, and so did John Betjeman. Kenneth Patchen actually made drawings to accompany his poems. I don't think they're very good, but what do I know? Blake, I guess, is the all-time champion, creating stupendous illuminations and engravings connected to his work. Dante Gabriel Rossetti painted very well and wrote very well.

So here's a shout-out to three bloggers who are poets who paint and painters who write. In some ways, blogging is a great medium for the writer/painter or painter/writer (and "painter" is kind of a place-holder for all sorts of visual art, including digital collages, photography, videography, etc.). In a weird way, the Internet is helping us loop back to medieval times, when texts were routinely illuminated and the visual & textual got on quite well. The bloggers:

http://francaldwellsnotebook.blogspot.com/ and on this one there is a link to another site with images of the blogger's paintings

http://ascribbleorasonnet.blogspot.com/

http://loosejuicyart.blogspot.com/

And here's a link to Deb Richardson's site. She does quilts and visual collages (including the Emily/Elvis one up top):

http://www.debrichardson.com/artquilts.html