Thread: Night & Day
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Unread 10-29-2016, 02:47 AM
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Ann Drysdale Ann Drysdale is online now
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Sharon, that last post was a placeholder while I tried to do a crit of the picture as a poem, as I promised I would and I'm getting desperate. The poem was a mixture of what I felt and what I knew, not a collage but a cakemix, fork-twiddled to a dropping consistency and baked in my own head-oven. It is not a "critique" of picture, artist or model. It is a poem, which is a thing I think I can do. There is an element of me in it, like a secret spice or a particular wrist-action.

If I flex my muscles on the easiest of the three pictures, I find it slightly offensive because tears only come out of that bit of eyes when they are driven by one of those gizmos that clowns use, to make a huge and obvious boo-hoo: "Look at me, poor Tramp, Auguste has made me cry". Nonetheless, I think that if the three were sold as prints in a high street shop, that picture would outsell the others. Saying that says more about me than the art, though, and I feel helplessly out of my depth.

But at some point I need to move away from the picture I know and love and relate to, past the one that makes me feel hatefully superior onto the one that I am supposed to be addressing.

I am trying, I really am. I feel as if I am looking at one of those vertical blinds, through which I am being asked to peer and before I can push it aside and look at the bit that interests me, I need to draw it together to see what's on it. A sort of popular paisley, pastel, Barbie, princess, peacock. I know I couldn't live with it and would need to shove it further aside so as to better see the real "beyond" of it, like taking a glass of wine up to the top of my garden so as to look over the house to see the lights on the other side of the valley.

And I realise that I'm doing that with the art in my life, moving aside the Keane to see the Picasso, so to speak. And in Night and Day the strings of bubble-beads that link the two are the mystery that I need to solve before I can make any meaningful critique of the art either as picture or poem. (I restructured that sentence to avoid using "critique" as a verb. I am a pedant.)

Trying to (write it) critique Night and Day in terms of either discipline just revels to me the appalling subjectivity of my vision and the lack of academic spectacles through which to look beyond it.

I will try to do better, but I wanted you to know I'm on the case.
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