Imbolc Hare Moon
“An angel…his whisper went all through my body:
‘Don’t be ashamed to be human, be proud!'” Romanesque Arches
Discussed Tomas Transtormer and his poetry today with two docents, Jane McKenzie and Jean-Marie. Shows how meager my grasp of contemporary poetry is. I’d not heard of him, a Swedish Nobel Prize Winner, and a damn fine poet. His work has a crystalline edge, images cut with words as facets.
“The man on a walk suddenly meets the old
giant oak like an elk turned to stone with
its enormous antlers against the dark green castle wall
of the fall ocean.” Storm
His poetry suggests a tour focused on image. What is an image? How do we know one? What is the same, what is different between the image of a poet and the image of a painter? Of poet and sculptor? Of poet and photographer? What is there about an image that makes us yearn to create them, remember them, see them, hear them?
The Matisse exhibition shows an artist focused on and struggling with this very question. How can I use paint, color, line to say woman, flower, wall? Is it different if I ask the same question of bronze and clay? Who might guide me? Van Gogh? Cezanne? Seurat? Monet? Early in his career he answers yes to all these guides and works to see the world through their eyes, yet imprint it, too, with his own vision.
Due to a collecting idiosyncrasy of the Cone sisters (patronnesses of both Matisse and the Baltimore museum) the show jumps from his experimental years and works in a mid-career but still formative stage to the bright lights of the last gallery, the wonderful prints from his book, Jazz, and other colorful pieces. This is a joyful painter who thought long and hard about his work, wanting it to appear effortless.
Matisse took line and color to reveal the essence of image. And he makes it look easy and the human beings in his work are proud, just as the angel whispered they should be.
