erasure experiments continued

I've continued experimenting with the zentangle / erasure poetry project, beyond just creating the "output image". Because I like to "see the journey", I hit on the idea of a triptych, showing the original page, the found poem, and the found poem output image. So you get three shots at the same words, in different arrangements. And on paper, I can start to add further lines and words (to really make this feel like a Tom Phillips rip-off!).

Well, it feels like a long project, and I am enjoying myself, anyway :)

erasure experiment 005

Islands
Eyenhallow, uninhabited island
Summer afternoon, carpeted with a congregation of selkie

Hoy, sound of singing,
plangent musical

Stromness mornings, water town, 

pleasant rooftop sitting with paper, pen, 

working magic

Scapa Flow, childhood
An hour reading early lives

erasure experiment 004

I've found a simple way to blot out the unwanted words, but worry that things might end up looking a bit same-y if I use that method all the time, so will definitely keep experimenting with other ideas as they occur to me...

Wide awake

Afternoon disaster,
writing monosyllabic, tapering hands

Stromness afternoon
witty, vivacious, he showed us a Queen of our attention
Enthralled islands, different world unreal in that morning

Sentences that pleased come back,
walk and belong here in Orkney

On Papa Westray
overlooking the sea,
the seventy islanders dance

erasure experiment 003

Experimenting with different ways to make the chosen words stand out, here overwriting the unwanted words with "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog". It's a way of adding something rather than subtracting something. Would maybe work better if a) more relevant words were chosen, and b) the words were added by hand. Started me thinking about printing out the pages and adding more to them...



Portrait

A part after years
a poet in an age roots, drawing boundaries
Travel, time, islands and generations
Travel and depth,
the road stands by a gallows
“Martyrs,” she explained, as real as the past
Let me travel north to the islands
bright spilling over with light

try

what is a good bye?

BluePrintReview book+lit blog: Magpie Days - Julia Davies

BluePrintReview book+lit blog: Magpie Days - Julia Davies: In July and August, the 100 Days Project gathered story writers, poets, painters, photographers, filmmakers, musicians, and programmers together...

click above to see the BluePrintReview's blog review of my 100 Days project - please!

100 days project

A pictorial update... we are 78 days in & I am 5 days behind; I started 10days behind everyone else, on day 11 so I have made up some ground! I've been playing around with collecting all the images together for an issuu publication when complete, and am loving the patchwork grid/stained glass effect; and the best part about looking at the completed-so-far grid is realising just how much I have already done.

Life imitating art

The plane finally arrives over Mexico City at sunset, mountain ridges are poking up from the misty clouds, blue zigzags within milky blue, and above the roseate gold sun touches the world.
A glinting in the distance, I am not sure if it is a lake or another plane on a different trajectory.
The edge of the sky glows behind the darker mountains, pinkish red contrasts the indigo ridges, and how does the red segue through orange and gold to the brightest lightest blue without a hint of green in between?
As the sun sets, the hills become velvety.
The stripes of coloured clouds in the sky are reflected on the silvery wing of the plane as it banks and turns, grazing the edges of the bowl of mountains.
We leave the country a couple of days later as politics and crime intrude, but the sublime beauty of the arrival in this country will stay with me despite the hastened departure.

Creating...

Her art, I don't understand it, I don't know how she does it, I just don't understand the creative process between a visual idea and a finished piece. I don't know what it is that she puts into it or what she thinks about it and only vaguely have an understanding of where the ideas come from; not how they have grown and twisted and changed in the execution, the paints or inks or materials sneaking something of themselves in to flavour the picture. I can still feel the frustration I had in art class at school, at having images in my head that I could not get out onto paper, my visual sense outstripping any ability I had to represent it.



Looking at pieces that I do not understand, I can think "Oh, I like that," or the reverse, but my lack of comprehension strikes at my art, my writing; I do not have the vocabulary to explain why I feel about a picture the way I do.


I assume that writing is a less difficult art as surely everyone understands words, but maybe the writing process is as opaque to others as creating visual art is to me. I sit down to write, the words (cliché alert) do spill out, they need jumbling, weighing and organising so that they flow until I can feel within myself when something is finished, finished and rough polished; maybe needing feedback for that final gloss but I have created phrases, pieces that I am happy with.