Merging: Ink and Word
In 2004 I received a grant from the Vermont Community Foundation Arts Endowment Fund. This grant gave me the opportunity to explore ways of integrating my poetry and Chinese brush painting.
I studied art as an undergraduate at Bennington College and then obtained
a Masters of Fine Arts in Poetry from Vermont College. My poems are based
in the imagery of the land. They are lyrical in nature and often quiet.
My poems share a feeling that is also present in my paintings; the paintings
are just like my poems, but without words.
After becoming fascinated with the often poetic layering of images which
make-up Kanji characters, I studied Chinese calligraphy and began brush
painting. Brush painting tied together my early love of painting and my
more recent commitment to poetry in a way that felt natural and spiritually
regenerative. Brush painting has been governed for centuries by precise
rules that succeed in leaving space for the accident and spontaneity that
gives life to painting.
My project brought these two art forms, poetry and painting, together in
my own work for the first time. Of course, the two art forms are often related
in the Chinese tradition. My practice involved creating poems in Chinese
using the Kanji characters, and then experimenting with modern and traditional
ways of using this poetry in my painting.
During this process, I discovered that the paintings I created felt more
wholly myself than any I had created up to this point. Within the paintings,
I juxtaposed English, Chinese, painted images, and panels of color. Due
to the needs of the materials and initiative, I discovered a process which
employed the method of collage. I mounted rice paper, using the traditional
wheat glue, onto watercolor paper. This allowed me to write the English
onto the underlying paper with a pen nib. I could then mount the painting,
color panels, and Chinese calligraphy onto the scripted paper. The rice
paper is so thin that the underlying writing is visible yet muted. This
creates a subtle effect in the paintings that matches well the tone of my
poems.
For this project, I wrote poems using several techniques. At first Kanji
characters inspired me, and the characters themselves drove the creation
of the English poems. These poems, unsurprisingly, are more image based
in the Chinese. Later, I used a method of translating back and forth between
the English and the Chinese. In the Chinese, these poems are smoother, more
modern. Yet, as my dear teacher and friend Yinglei Zhang reminds me, my
poems are not Chinese poems. Chinese poems follow very strict rules. In
Chinese, my poems set characters together with meaning.
I am grateful to both the Vermont Community Foundation and Yinglei Zhang, for making it possible for me to bring forth this work. Yinglei checked my translations to insure their integrity. She also honored me with candid criticism and great kindness.
This work is also presented within a chapbook. Check on my poetry page for
more information.
