New work: After Jakuren

A few months back I spent an evening at an Arts Café, where different art forms came together to say "Hello" to each other. I saw poetry and dance and music as well as my more usual diet of visual arts. This, by lucky happenstance, coincided with a growing desire to stretch myself in terms of the content and ambition of my work. It became inescapable over the course of the evening that there was much to be gained from a little multi-disciplinary cross-pollination.

Barely two weeks later, a brief landed in my inbox - submit a picture inspired by an out-of-copyright poem. This was the nudge I needed and I started reading randomly. Rather, I started trying to read. I found found poem after poem to be interminable, impenetrable. Narratives, epics, tales of the heart, comic rhymes and hymns to morality vied with complaints of the arduousness of human existence with nary one that excited me. I stopped reading and started thinking. As an artist, I'm interested in a moment, a mood, a glimpse of a place and, even in the midst of my ignorance, I knew of one culture of poetry that embodies these same interests - Japan. All I knew was the haiku, but I found so much more.

Short forms of Japanese poetry are verbal stock cubes, they are words and moments and feelings made as small and intense as possible and they use a visual language. There could be no better fit with my own aims.

I'm working on a body of artworks in which I am taking the imagery from historic Japanese poems and transplant them into my own place and time - 21st century Southern England. To this end the translations are beyond loose - they are starting points. Mountains have become hills, plants have changed species and architecture has a different vernacular but the sense, the mood and (wherever possible) the wordplay have been retained. Except they haven't. I believe that one of the key differences between pictures and art is that the process of making art is more speculative and open ended; specifically its akin to a conversation between artist, subject, medium and artwork. In this case, as the poem affects the painting so the painting affects the poem. This fascinates me; normally the subject of a painting isn't changed by the process but here, well why not change the poem?

Anyway, here is the first in what may be a long series. It starts with a poem by the monk Jakuren, who died about 800 years ago. It roughly translates as

Ah, solitude.
It is not the kind of thing
that has a colour.
Mountains lined with black pine
on an evening in autumn.

A lot of thinking later, both about the multi-facetted nature of solitude and the link in the English language between colour and emotion, and we have a painting of a forest and a poem transplanted into England and further transformed from Jakuren's understanding of solitude to my own more varied and vibrant concept of it by the substitution of a single word.

Ah, solitude.
It is not the kind of thing
that has one colour.
A hillside cloaked in dark pines
on an autumn evening.

As to the painting, to spell out my thoughts would be to remove the possibility of interpretation and interpretation is part of the charm of the short and minimal poems from Japan. I will say that I've moved it from evening to dusk for purely practical reasons so that I could major on colour - which I considered important.