The Poetry of Art

What is a poem? The use of words to covey meaning through abstract composition that allows the arbitrariness of content to flow freeing the word from conventional context through creative construction to convey a language of thought transcending the confines of linguistics. What is visual poetry? It is art that uses the visual to convey meaning through abstract composition that allows the arbitrariness of content to flow freeing the image from conventional context through creative construction to convey an aesthetic of thought transcending the confines of logical aesthetics. Such is the visual poetry of artists Susan Beck, Bonnie Sucec and Ryan K. Peterson to be shown beginning March 11th at the Finch Lane Gallery.

“Our route thus compass’d we, a segment widely stretch’d
Between the dry embankment, and the core
Of the loath’d pool, turning meanwhile our eyes
Downward on those who gulp’d its muddy lees…” Canto VII, 129-133
Those “who gulp’d its muddy lees” is a hell divined by Dante in the “Divine Comedy” to which those who transgressed the sin of anger are condemned made lucid to the reader. Artist Susan Beck’s composition “Distance Looks Our Way” might be said to be painted as Dante wrote, with an air of gravity and sublimity that can be greater appreciated with a poetic sensitivity. In this expressive lyrical ambiance we feel the universal awe of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” and simultaneously recognize the anxiety of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.” These seemingly contradictory states of being find themselves well placed in this visual poem drawing the mind and the eye from one direction to the next grappling for reason. But there is none. The eye might think it “gets it” but the mind realizes that it doesn’t and gives in to the irrationality. Here is a subject sublimated to substance as the visual is appreciated poetically.
As the chorus of angels wrestle Mephistopheles to redeem Faust at last they beckon:
On to the light,
Loving flames, stream,
May truth redeem
Self-damned from blight,
That, gladly weaned
From evil and cleaned,
In the All-Unity
Blessed they be.” 11801-11808
The idea that the spirit can be rescued even from the most damning reality, even that of Faust in Goethe’s masterpiece, is a theme common to poetry and art and Beck reflects on such themes in her emotive visual poem “Let Go, Damn It.” Once more we find more substance than subject with a Goya-like darkness contrasted with the universal messages of salvation in many paintings of William Blake. The message is fundamentally optimistic, one of humanism and the capability of humankind. Here is adversity but ultimately one finds him or herself believing in the faceless but not helpless creature who clings to a thread of hope, her only salvation. Beck is consistent with imagery that cannot be read with logic but is allowed to manifest through sensory intuition: a poetic sensibility.
The visual poetry of Bonnie Sucec each, she said, “develops on its own- starting with a fragment- the painting unwinds with twists and turns and seldom a solution.” These visual poems are lush and alive and enrich the viewer who may explore the pastiche of style and motif with a “joie de vivre” temperament. Sucec’s “The Sun and the Moon” is itself a poem as lyrical as a sonnet.
“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath too short a date.” XVIII, 1-4
Sucec’s liberated aesthetic is delightful and compels sensations such as in this sonnet by William Shakespeare. This work can be interpreted visually with the sense of mystery of Marc Chagall with his same enjoyable color cacophonies which enhance the whimsical iconography. These prints have many tales to tell that can be enjoyed by releasing sensory perception and not penetrative scrutinizing.
In the capricious poem “A Tout Épreuve” by Surrealist poet Paul Elouard, translated loosely as “Through all of the Trials,” he writes “A la suite des images, Le masse de la lumiére roule vers d’autre rêves” or “After the visual experience, the body of light follows on to other dreams.” The Surrealists made ample use of the irrational and the sense of displacement found in Elouard’s poem to expound on greater depths of consciousness. In like manner Sucec’s “Venus in a Half Shell” incites the imagination to meander through the inviting imagery such as one would the oeuvre of Surrealist painter Max Ernst whose similar “narratives” lack a beginning, have no middle and will reach no end. Only the sensual experience of this visual poem can give it its raison de être. These visual poems encourage meaning by avoiding rational interpretation and submitting to depths of the conscious.
Ryan K. Peterson’s works might be described as “grotesque”… “I believe in a collective consciousness so I would like to think others might relate to seeing childhood monsters, stalking predators, metaphorical giants and the curious, not-so-subjective reality behind our eyes,” he said. His visual poetry invites thoughts of horror in the face of the uncanny as what we see might seem tied to somewhere in the psyche that we find uncomfortable. “It’s Looking for Me” is a visual poem that might resonate with the subject of memory and temporality, but nervously so. These memories may seem in retrospect not fond and the viewer must, as must all, reconcile their peace with their own as Peterson may be doing.
“So I loved a dream?
My doubt, a mass of ancient night, concludes
In many a subtle branch, which, since the real woods
Remain, proves, alas, what I offered to myself
As triumph was the ideal lack of roses.
Let’s think it over…” Stéphane Mallarmé
Ultimately we cannot escape our own reality.
Peterson’s most uncomfortable visual poems are his sculptures “Brother’s Bighead” which, he said, “are dreams, phobias and personal imagery manifested in sculpture.” “White Big Head” is sculpted poetry that is ironic and ugly and makes no sense outside of a poetic engagement with it.
“Stupidity, delusion, selfishness and lust
Torment our bodies and possess our minds,
And we sustain our affable remorse
The way a beggar nourishes his lice,”
Realist poet Charles Baudelaire here offers warning to the reader who begins to explore the daunting channels of thought to be found in his collection “Les Fleures du Mal.” Baudelaire was a poet of realism at odds with Parisian Modernity. His poems are not dark fantasies but truth of reality as he saw it. “White Big Head” is absurd like the work of sculptor Louise Bourgeois and in this absurdity can be found reality, traces of the real confronting us and our own reality with the crafty gaze of “White Big Head.” This is the same gaze that met the men of Paris who entered the Salon of 1865 to Eduard Manet’s painted courtesan, “Olympia,” making them embarrassingly self-conscious of their own debauchery.
Art considered historically has most frequently required a literal interpretation and has had specific aims and purposes. However there is a wealth of art, such as that of Beck, Sucec and Peterson, that will lose the recognition of its intrinsic value and the meaningful experience offered to the viewer when attempted to be understood with any degree of the absolute. Beck’s visual poems transcend being, Sucec’s explores consciousness while Peterson’s challenges reality in ways that transcend, explore, and challenge standardized notions of aesthetics.
“Another hardened expanse, once marked with occasional cairns
Spreads out ahead--mountainless.
The minutia of divots and pimples’
Of furrows and flakes, lead the way,” writes featured artist Susan Beck.