Writing Notes No. 1
Filed Under (Writing) by Estee on 06-11-2009
I have a list of writing topics. There they are, line by line, one stacked upon the other awaiting more words in my little red writing book. The book is full enough to make me feel somewhat accomplished. The weight of the paper from its corresponding blue ink feels thick and full and crinkles differently than a crisp, empty page. I love flipping through written pages or read pages as in a book that I’ve broken well into.
There sure are a lot of ideas and words in that book. Like NaNoWriMo, I can claim my 50,000 words and then some. But as lovely as the weight of words feels in my hands, they are not woven together.
Weaving together is the art of writing. I can draw the perfect picture in my mind, and even watch my hand create it, but when it comes down to getting down to it, one just has to keep practicing. It’s never as easy as we believe in our minds, for what’s being created in our minds cannot be expressed as easily when we have to coordinate our bodies. There may be the will to create, even an idea, but the act of doing is much more difficult.
As a curator of art I was always mortified when some bloke would try to get under my skin and proclaim of a Barnett Newman painting that “I could do that at home.” I suppose some people believe that artists are sometimes pulling “a fast one” on us, but I think it’s a lot more complicated than that. There are a lot of “notes,” run-on sentences, thoughts and other bodies of work before the final product is complete.
If I could sift my writing (as in a Barnett Newman painting) and get it as tight as a few poignant lines on an otherwise empty canvas, that, for me, would be an accomplishment.
ESTÉE KLAR
TORONTO, ONTARIO, CANADA
Writer/Curator/Founder of The Autism Acceptance Project. Lecturer on autism & the media, and parenting. Graduate student Critical Disability Studies, York University. I like to write about our journey, musings, attitudes towards autism.
While I sympathize with that bloke, I also recognize that my lack of appreciation for such works has more to do with me than with the work of art. I just don’t see the “few poignant lines.”
But I agree weaving is part of the art of writing, and that knowing what to leave out is just as important as knowing what to put in.
Think ssssssssift. :0)
Here’s a summary that I found on Wiki for you so I don’t have to write it myself:
An example is his letter in April 9, 1955, “Letter to Sidney Janis: —It is true that Rothko talks the fighter. He fights, however, to submit to the philistine world. My struggle against bourgeois society has involved the total rejection of it.”[4]
Throughout the 1940s he worked in a surrealist vein before developing his mature style. This is characterised by areas of color separated by thin vertical lines, or “zips” as Newman called them. In the first works featuring zips, the color fields are variegated, but later the colors are pure and flat. Newman himself thought that he reached his fully mature style with the Onement series (from 1948). The zips define the spatial structure of the painting, whilst simultaneously dividing and uniting the composition.
The zip remained a constant feature of Newman’s work throughout his life. In some paintings of the 1950s, such as The Wild, which is eight feet tall by one and a half inches wide, the zip is all there is to the work. Newman also made a few sculptures which are essentially three-dimensional zips.
Although Newman’s paintings appear to be purely abstract, and many of them were originally untitled, the names he later gave them hinted at specific subjects being addressed, often with a Jewish theme. Two paintings from the early 1950s, for example, are called Adam and Eve (see Adam and Eve), and there is also Uriel (1954) and Abraham (1949), a very dark painting, which as well as being the name of a biblical patriarch, was also the name of Newman’s father, who had died in 1947.
Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue?, 1966. Typical of Newman’s later work, with the use of pure and vibrant color.
The Stations of the Cross series of black and white paintings (1958-66), begun shortly after Newman had recovered from a heart attack, is usually regarded as the peak of his achievement. The series is subtitled “Lema sabachthani” – “why have you forsaken me” – words spoken by Christ on the cross. Newman saw these words as having universal significance in his own time. The series has also been seen as a memorial to the victims of the holocaust.
The difficulty I have is that I think in words, not in pictures. Seeing a picture, unless it’s familiar in some way, it needs to be translated into words for me to really get it. Otherwise it’s just pretty or not pretty, consonant or dissonant, busy or “just right” or boring.
The color sections with the zips makes more sense to me with the words (thank you!), but I would never have gotten that on my own. I can, on the other hand, look at this and I find it interesting, but I wouldn’t be able to analyze it.