I always thought he was the spirit of someone who had departed this vale of tears and returned to give his living love spiritual birthday buss.
What lessons for our writing can we take from da Vinci's Mona Lisa? What is she saying? Am I light or am I dark? You try to figure it out. I'm not conflicted, are you? Nothing is as it seems. What have you done for me? I see you, do you see me? When does the party start? You sly old codger. Spoiler: Mona Lisa
If you ever happen to be driving along the Columbia River, you ought to stop at the Maryhill Museum then. They have a Rodin gallery there, dozens of pieces. Quite cool.
Raffaello Sanzio Raphael, The Sistine Madonna (c. 1512-1514) The two chubby cherubs at the bottom border on iconoclastic, and their images today adorn a host of consumer goods, from boxes of chocolates and condom packages. The story goes Raphael modelled the cherubs after the sons of the model for Mary, two little boys who got tired and bored waiting around all day for Mom.
I don't know. I guess writing exists in the greater context of art... and then there's the aesthetics types. Don't get me started on those people! All the same, this thread would be cooler if there were more examples of literature than pictures. This seems interesting. It's a love story told in dictionary format. Not sure I'd have the patience to see it through, but an admirable feat nonetheless. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9279177-the-lover-s-dictionary And of course there's House of Leaves, a real heavyweight in challenging quos and statuses with its unique format. Spoiler: picture of a page
The proper answer would be "Ah, but this is the Lounge!" But then I checked, and it's General Writing. Probably should be lounge-ified.
Hmm... I don't think I'd like to read a book like that. I want my words to be invisible as my imagination creates and focuses on the images the words conjure.
I dunno, the take-away from visual art can be applied to writing. Anything that makes you think or feel can be applied to writing.
Occasionally I teach a class in observation that is open to both writers and visual artists. The point of the class is seeing old things in new ways. The fun comes when the writers are forced to draw and the artists are forced to write. Mostly it works out, but once in a while someone panics about having to leave their comfort zone. Genuinely panics, with wide eyes and an expression of anxious dread. Interestingly enough, such extreme reactions come mostly from visual artists. Writers grumble about drawing, but upon being assured that skill is not expected, they generally manage to scribble down a few pictures.
The word ekphrasis, or ecphrasis, comes from the Greek for the written description of a work of art produced as a rhetorical or literary exercise, often used in the adjectival form ekphrastic. It is a vivid, often dramatic, verbal description of a visual work of art, either real or imagined. Several examples in literature and poetry are given at the link above. The ekphrastic description below of the Mona Lisa by Walter Pater is a testament to the inspirational power of visual art. "The presence that thus rose so strangely beside the waters, is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire. Hers is the head upon which all 'the ends of the world are come', and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed! All the thoughts and experiences of the world have been etched and moulded there, in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants: and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands. The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one; and modern thought has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, all modes of thought and life. Certainly, Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea."
It's the proximity of relevance that matters. Everything is related to everything else if you include enough degrees of separation, but that's not very helpful for organizing things.
Well, that's not very true, the way I see it. And most of this thread seems to have nothing to do with writing. At least it's not writing that's being discussed. But whatever...
Not to speak for Deadrats, but he didn't say it bothers him, only that he believes it's in the wrong subforum. At least I think that's the point. Louanne isn't doing creative writing about art, more like posting pictures of it and articles about it and making comments. The best fit I can think of for it on this forum would be the Lounge. Is that where Pictures You Like and Members Photos are located?
I started this thread with the hope that we might explore the ways in which all art is bound together. It's somewhat of a disappointment to me that the pictures I did post did not generate discussion about themes that visual art and literature/writing have in common. It's worth noting that every art movement - Romanticism, Expressionism, Realism, Surrealism, Abstraction, Naturalism, to name a few - has been realized in both visual art and literature/writing. One influences the other. Having said that, if the Mods feel this thread better belongs in the Lounge, then that's great.
Whatever the reason, deadrats persistently disrupts the flow of a thread that I've found interesting and relevant. Anyone can ask moderators to relocate a thread. Badgering the OP about its relevance is unneccessary. Can we please be done with the disruptions and return to the theme which Louanne has now explained in more detail?
Magical realism in art as defined in 1925 by German visual artist Franz Roh gradually morphed into magical realism in writing, employed by writers like Gabriel García Márquez and Louise Erdrich. What frosts my apricots is the insistence that the literary term "magical realism" is properly limited to Latin American writers and using it to describe exactly the same style in non-Latino writers is a form of cultural appropriation. Very weird considering the concept started out in Germany. Franz Roh Michael Parkes. Frida Kahlo
