From April Studio
Notes
April 7, 2007.
Lac Ouaureau, late morning.
Reading B. J. Leggett about A. E. Housman’ s “artistic form”…
“Contemporary versions of a
psychoanalytic aesthetic theory assume that artistic form works to defend
the artist against the anxiety aroused by the content”
My sometimes artistic form—
Make it appear as a yellowed old
manuscript or a painting left darkening in an attic. The stories told and
the things depicted are long ago and far away. What was the sad and
troubled when new has now long later only the charm of the old and
forgotten.
Housman’s “creative need”—
“Housman’s almost mystical
description of the composition of his verse as a passive and involuntary
process characterized by illness, agitation and exhaustion is offered as
his final argument for the purely emotional nature of poetry, its
non-intellectual basis.”
My “creative need”—
Worried and emotionally tense
with no particular object of concern, there very frequently come to mind
the words, “learn to draw— painting, painting— drawing, drawing.” I
guess I better find out how.
Housman’s “creative method”—
“Housman…describes the act of
composition as pure spontaneity: ‘As I went along, thinking of nothing in
particular…there would flow into my mind, with sudden and unaccountable
emotion, sometimes a line or two of verse, sometimes a whole stanza at
once, accompanied, not preceded, by a vague notion of the poem of which
they were to be a part.’”
My “creative method”—
Set the paper straight and
centered on the table; spray it with clear water; brush the surface with a
wide, dry brush; first drip the ochre or raw sienna on the paper and then
spray; then drip the carbon black and spray… Remember the visual
equivalent of Housman’s “line or two… sometimes a whole stanza” and begin
to find what the colors and shapes give to the paper and to me.
