Art Lovers discussion

Which work of art best represents the perfect marriage of visual art and poetry?

(This should be a perfect question for our more well establish poet (s) 😉)

When I posted this question this morning I thought of Dirk’s poems that he posts with the paintings he puts up to guess in the other folder.

So Dirk, does your poem go with the first painting? Is that how you do it? Maybe you could answer this question better here...

Well... I normally have a selection ready of the artist I still want to do and sometimes the poem or the lyrics comes very naturally.
The embossed print by Nevelson is called "Morning Cloud" and that made me think of Clouds by Joni Mitchell and the song "Both sides now"
Sometimes it's just something in the painting: as with the Mirrors by Van Hove. I just went looking for poetry with the theme mirror and perchance I hit on a very good one (the Sylvia Plath).
It started as just a way to give the topic a nice title, but now I spend sometimes more time finding a good poem/lyric/text that looking for pics ;-)

What a lot of work, Dirk! Thank you.

Interesting, thank you for the time you put into that, Dirk.

You're both Welcome. I really like doing it :-)

I'm enjoying the poems and songs too, Dirk. Quite often I'm more familiar with the poem or song than the artist, especially the modern artists. You have good taste in music!

The Starry Night

That does not keep me from having a terrible need of — shall I say the word — religion. Then I go out at night to paint the stars.
— Vincent Van Gogh in a letter to his brother

The town does not exist
except where one black-haired tree slips
up like a drowned woman into the hot sky.
The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars.
Oh starry night! This is how
I want to die.

It moves. They are all alive.
Even the moon bulges in its orange irons
to push children, like a god, from its eye.
The old unseen serpent swallows up the stars.
Oh starry starry night! This is how
I want to die:

into that rushing beast of the night,
sucked up by that great dragon, to split
from my life with no flag,
no belly,
no cry.

Anne Sexton
1928-1974

Don McLean:

Starry, starry night
Paint your palette blue and grey
Look out on a summer's day
With eyes that know the darkness in my soul
Shadows on the hills
Sketch the trees and the daffodils
Catch the breeze and the winter chills
In colors on the snowy linen land
Now I understand
What you tried to say to me
And how you suffered for your sanity
And how you tried to set them free
They would not listen, they did not know how
Perhaps they'll listen now
Starry, starry night
Flaming flowers that brightly blaze
Swirling clouds in violet haze
Reflect in Vincent's eyes of china blue
Colors changing hue
Morning fields of amber grain
Weathered faces lined in pain
Are soothed beneath the artist's loving hand
Now I understand
What you tried to say to me
And how you suffered for your sanity
And how you tried to set them free
They would not listen, they did not know how
Perhaps they'll listen now
For they could not love you
But still your love was true
And when no hope was left in sight
On that starry, starry night
You took your life, as lovers often do
But I could have told you, Vincent
This world was never meant for one
As beautiful as you
Starry, starry night
Portraits hung in empty halls
Frameless heads on nameless walls
With eyes that watch the world and can't forget
Like the strangers that you've met
The ragged men in the ragged clothes
The silver thorn, a bloody rose
Lie crushed and broken on the virgin snow
Now I think I know
What you tried to say to me
And how you suffered for your sanity
And how you tried to set them free
They would not listen, they're not listening still
Perhaps they never will

https://youtu.be/oxHnRfhDmrk

Connie wrote: "I'm enjoying the poems and songs too, Dirk. Quite often I'm more familiar with the poem or song than the artist, especially the modern artists. You have good taste in music!"

Thanks Connie!
Sometimes the song or lyrics lead to more comments than the art ;-)
Remember Lichtenstein and Horse with no Name?

Ophelia
John Everett Millais
1851-1852

The scene is described in Act IV, Scene VII of Hamlet in a speech by Queen Gertrude.
John Everett Millais in 1865, by Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll)

The episode depicted is not usually seen onstage, as in Shakespeare's text it exists only in Gertrude's description. Out of her mind with grief, Ophelia has been making garlands of wildflowers. She climbs into a willow tree overhanging a brook to dangle some from its branches, and a bough breaks beneath her. She lies in the water singing songs, as if unaware of her danger ("incapable of her own distress"). Her clothes, trapping air, have allowed her to temporarily stay afloat ("Her clothes spread wide, / And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up."). But eventually, "her garments, heavy with their drink, / Pull'd the poor wretch from her melodious lay" down "to muddy death".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophelia...

"A poem based on a picture or work of art is called an ekphrasis. Though the term literally references the descriptive aspect of ekphrastic writing, the poet Alfred Corn states in his essay on the history of ekphrastic verse, "Once the ambition of producing a complete and accurate description is put aside, a poem can provide new aspects for a work of visual art."

https://poets.org/poems-based-works-art

According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring

a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry

of the year was
awake tingling
near

the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself

sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning

Dirk wrote: "Connie wrote: "I'm enjoying the poems and songs too, Dirk. Quite often I'm more familiar with the poem or song than the artist, especially the modern artists. You have good taste in music!"

Thanks..."

Oh, I love Lichtenstein's horse with the clueless cowboy! I really could not remember whether America or Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young played that song. I think we might have owned it in VINYL back in the day!

Heather, the art and the corresponding poems are all lovely.

Here's a link to some more Ophelia paintings. The Millais has the greenery that Ophelia was reaching for, but the Meunier has the dark dress that might have been worn by a daughter grieving for her father.

https://bookstr.com/article/9-paintin...

Thank you, Connie! I like how the poems go with and are about the art.
And those other pictures are neat from the link you posted, thank you!

The Bay of Marseilles, Seen from L'Estaque
Paul Cézanne
1885

Cezanne's Ports

n the foreground we see time and life
swept in a race
toward the left hand side of the picture
where shore meets shore.

But that meeting place
isn't represented;
it doesn't occur on the canvas.

For the other side of the bay
is Heaven and Eternity,
with a bleak white haze over its mountains.

And the immense water of L'Estaque is a go-between
for minute rowboats.

Allen Ginsberg

The Great Wave off Kanagawa
Katsushika Hokusai
1829-1833

The Great Wave

It is because the sea is blue,
Because Fuji is blue, because the bent blue
Men have white faces, like the snow
On Fuji, like the crest of the wave in the sky the color of their
Boats. It is because the air
Is full of writing, because the wave is still: that nothing
Will harm these frail strangers,
That high over Fuji in an earthcolored sky the fingers
Will not fall; and the blue men
Lean on the sea like snow, and the wave like a mountain leans
Against the sky.

In the painter's sea
All fishermen are safe. All anger bends under his unity.
But the innocent bystander, he merely
'Walks round a corner, thinking of nothing': hidden
Behind a screen we hear his cry.
He stands half in and half out of the world; he is the men,
But he cannot see below Fuji
The shore the color of sky; he is the wave, he stretches
His claws against strangers. He is
Not safe, not even from himself. His world is flat.
He fishes a sea full of serpents, he rides his boat
Blindly from wave to wave toward Ararat.

Donald Finkel

I did want to mention that one of our own members, Ruth, is very good at ekphrastic poetry. To see some of her published poems, check out the folder

Talent of the Members https://www.goodreads.com/topic/group...

where she has posted some of her work.