A Poem By Wallace Stevens Set To Painting
Painter Diane Szczepaniak made the series Sunday Morning based on verses of the Stevens poem of the same name. This is what happened.
Death is the mother of Beauty.
Wallace Stevens, “Sunday Morning”
In the philosophy of Wallace Stevens, any act of intense perception is a kind of poem. And a poem, he says, is created and received as a duration of time. If one accepts the premise that a poem may not be, formally, a poem but a piece of time and an act of intense perception, then the series Sunday Morning by Diane Szczepaniak is an admirable example; a kind of poem.
The series of abstract paintings bases each on a verse of the poem of the same name and which Stevens wrote in 1915. It meets the sophisticated task of not only highlighting the changing experience of each verse but also expresses the theoretical insinuations that Stevens infused in his words. The paintings could be described as parts of a supreme reality fused with imagination, as Stevens always wanted poetry to be understood.
Recently, The Paris Review published an article in which the daughter of Diane Szczepaniak, Marissa Grunes, related how her mother conceived of the series and how abstraction and color branch harmonically with various levels of reality and the fiction of the poem “Sunday Morning.” At first, she says, her mother began by memorizing the poem every night, stanza by stanza, as a kind of ritual. While building each verse in her memory, she began to paint the experience of the images, music and emotions that charge the language. The paintings were converted from this series.
If the purpose of the poet, as conceived by Stevens, is to interpret the external world of thought and feeling through imagination, Szczepaniak does so in a way that is intensively perceptual and also meta-textual. It takes as its source the reality not of the external world but of the poem – which is already filtered by the imagination –, and the result is an abstract refinement that never loses the umbilical connection. As Grunes points out, the paintings “[…] solicit the sort of ardent attention that Stevens pays to textures, colors, smells, and sensations.”
It is true that “Sunday Morning” is one of the most complex poems in the body of Stevens’ work (one that deals with the search for spiritual meaning in the modern era, and where death hovers like a dark transparency over the jovial elements of a Sunday morning); but if this series of paintings fulfills its role to refer us the poem, to read it on the side of each part of the series, then it’s an extraordinary culmination. There are few greater pleasures than to understand something after looking at it with an intellect fused with imagination. Szczepaniak challenges the cursive look we use when reading and highlights that painting can ultimately be the ballroom of the poetic experience.
Related Articles
Pictorial spiritism (a woman's drawings guided by a spirit)
There are numerous examples in the history of self-taught artists which suggest an interrogation of that which we take for granted within the universe of art. Such was the case with figures like
Astounding fairytale illustrations from Japan
Fairy tales tribal stories— are more than childish tales. Such fictions, the characters of which inhabit our earliest memories, aren’t just literary works with an aesthetic and pleasant purpose. They
A cinematic poem and an ode to water: its rhythms, shapes and textures
Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water. - John Keats Without water the equation of life, at least life as we know it, would be impossible. A growing hypothesis holds that water, including the
Watch beauty unfold through science in this "ode to a flower" (video)
The study of the microscopic is one of the richest, most aesthetic methods of understanding the world. Lucky is the scientist who, upon seeing something beautiful, is able to see all of the tiny
To invent those we love or to see them as they are? Love in two of the movies' favorite scenes
So much has been said already, of “love” that it’s difficult to add anything, much less something new. It’s possible, though, perhaps because even if you try to pass through the sieve of all our
This app allows you to find and preserve ancient typographies
Most people, even those who are far removed from the world of design, are familiar with some type of typography and its ability to transform any text, help out dyslexics or stretch an eight page paper
The secrets of the mind-body connection
For decades medical research has recognized the existence of the placebo effect — in which the assumption that a medication will help produces actual physical improvements. In addition to this, a
The sea as infinite laboratory
Much of our thinking on the shape of the world and the universe derives from the way scientists and artists have approached these topics over time. Our fascination with the mysteries of the
Sharing and collaborating - natural movements of the creative being
We might sometimes think that artistic or creative activity is, in essence, individualistic. The Genesis of Judeo-Christian tradition portrays a God whose decision to create the world is as vehement
John Malkovich becomes David Lynch (and other characters)
John Malkovich and David Lynch are, respectively, the actor and film director who’ve implicitly or explicitly addressed the issues of identity and its porous barriers through numerous projects. Now