April 12, 2009

TRISHA ORR: “These paintings were generated in response to an invitation to collaborate with my husband, the poet Gregory Orr, for an exhibit entitled ‘Love Letter Invitational’ at the Second Street Gallery in Charlottesville, Virginia. The exhibit consisted of collaborative works done by writers and artists on the subject of ‘love.’ Greg and I had been asked to work in collaboration twice before, and each time he’d written poems based on my still life paintings. This time, we decided to reverse the process, so I would make paintings in response to his poems. I decided to incorporate the text of the poem or portions of the text into the painting. I used loosely constructed grids and tried to find the color and light and weight of the words in each poem. I wanted the language to be legible, but I reconfigured the line breaks to make compositions that were visually balanced. The texts of the paintings come from Greg’s two most recent books, Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved and How Beautiful the Beloved.”

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–from Rattle #29, Summer 2008
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March 28, 2009

TRISHA ORR: “These paintings were generated in response to an invitation to collaborate with my husband, the poet Gregory Orr, for an exhibit entitled ‘Love Letter Invitational’ at the Second Street Gallery in Charlottesville, Virginia. The exhibit consisted of collaborative works done by writers and artists on the subject of ‘love.’ Greg and I had been asked to work in collaboration twice before, and each time he’d written poems based on my still life paintings. This time, we decided to reverse the process, so I would make paintings in response to his poems. I decided to incorporate the text of the poem or portions of the text into the painting. I used loosely constructed grids and tried to find the color and light and weight of the words in each poem. I wanted the language to be legible, but I reconfigured the line breaks to make compositions that were visually balanced. The texts of the paintings come from Greg’s two most recent books, Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved and How Beautiful the Beloved.”

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from Rattle #29, Summer 2008
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March 14, 2009

Krista Franklin: “At the heart of my collages is a deep concern for creating complex and interrogative images, dream worlds and psychic landscapes. Deeply inspired by American popular culture and histories, as well as by the frenetic glamour of music videos and magazines, I create my collages in much the same way a hiphop producer creates a beat: through a process comparable to ‘sampling.’ Using a variety of medium—paint, handmade paper, playing cards, old photographs, receipts—I create new visions and totems wherein image is in dialogue with words (sometimes prominent, sometimes obscured), and the complexities of histories are evoked through a purposeful layering.” (web)

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–from Rattle #29, Summer 2008
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March 4, 2009

DAVID ALPAUGH: “I’m attracted to poetry by its thrilling language—the electricity generated by the A & B of metaphor ‘running beautiful together.’ Visual poetry increases the voltage, counterpointing the poem’s words with a third dimension that commands the eye and affords the complex pleasure of a triple-read. The circular, vortex-driven background of ‘Space Monkey’ forces the outwardthrusting text downward and into orbit around the photo of a nebula that looks suspiciously like a human eye.”

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from Rattle #29, Summer 2008
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March 2, 2009

RUTH BAVETTA: “I’ve been a visual artist longer than I’ve been a poet. For years I tried to find a way to integrate my art and my words. It wasn’t until 2005 that they came together when I started to work on the pages of old books, mostly with watercolors and inks, carving poems from the text that I found there.” (website)

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The Making of History

from Rattle #29, Summer 2008
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February 8, 2009

DIANNE CARROLL BURDICK: “I photographed all the images with black & white film and printed all images on fiber-base black & white paper. When the print is dry, I treat the paper with an oil-base solvent and color the image with colored pencils. ‘Dream of Trees’ was photographed at Moose Lake, Maine, around 7 a.m. My husband, Rob, and I were traveling from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, back home to Grand Rapids, Michigan. This view was too beautiful not to stop.”

LINDA NEMEC FOSTER: “Throughout my writing career, I have had a deep interest in collaborating with others. In 1998 Dianne Carroll Burdick asked me to write poems in response to her photography for a collaborative art/poetry exhibit called ‘The Good Earth.’ I composed haiku—the traditional form created by Japanese poets over 500 years ago. Then, as now, haiku were written in response to the natural world: the human reaction to the landscape that we are a part of, yet separate from. Ultimately, this project was not only about the landscapes of images and words, but about ourselves: how each of us reflects the universe that the world contains.”

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THE DREAM OF TREES

To walk like the scarves
Of clouds, to abandon land
And never return

from Rattle #29, Summer 2008
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February 3, 2009

ELLEN PECKHAM: “An adolescent, chafing against my provincial environment, I saw Breughel’s winter landscapes and suddenly my geography (snowy fields, stubble, crows) had aesthetic value. Ah, the shock of knowing farms out of season to be so beautiful! Many years later, driving on Long Island, a landscape of rutted earth, frosted surfaces, rusted foliage, crows and red snow fences waiting their purpose reminded me of the sequence and (my husband was driving) I grabbed a handy envelope going to the mail and noted the words and sketched the landscape. Though I often use both in my art it is unusual for the text and image to be simultaneous. Usually I write a poem and then begin to ‘see’ behind it or am working on a drawing when it speaks to me.”

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AUTUMN

Ocher darts.
Breughlian crows in a striated field.

Red fence leaning not yet against
Not yet snow.

–from Rattle #29, Summer 2008
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