EthicalDative

Wayne Thiebaud: ‘Deadpan Style of Figuration’

Posted on January 13, 2022 by JMN

“Untitled (Mountain and Clouds),” circa 1965. Credit… Wayne Thiebaud/Licensed by VAGA at ARS, New York [New York Times].

Wayne Thiebaud (1920-2021) is said to have painted daily to the end. He described himself as driven by “this almost neurotic fixation of trying to learn to paint.”

“It has never ceased to thrill and amaze me,” he said, “the magic of what happens when you put one bit of paint next to another… I wake up every morning and paint… I’ll be damned but I just can’t stop.”

“Flatland River,” 1997. Credit… Wayne Thiebaud/Licensed by VAGA at ARS, NY [New York Times].

Thiebaud called himself a painter. Saying you’re an artist, he said, is “like a priest referring to himself as a saint.” That was for someone else to decide.

[Thiebaud’s] real subject, many critics said, was paint and the act of painting itself: the shimmering color and sensuous texture of thickly applied paint. He laid on paint so heavily that he often carved his signature instead of putting it on with the brush.

“Tulip Sundaes,” 2010. Credit… Wayne Thiebaud/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY [New York Times].

Artists whose influence Thiebaud, a lifelong teacher himself, acknowledged include: Thomas Eakins, John James Audubon, Jean-Siméon Chardin, Giorgio Morandi, Edward Hopper, Joaquín Sorolla, and Willem de Kooning. The statement that Thiebaud’s art was “grounded in slow, hard-earned craftsmanship” points to “perspiration” as a factor in making art.

Mr. Thiebaud, with his painting “Swimsuit Figures,” was honored in 2017 at an event held by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Credit… Jill Krementz [New York Times].

Sources: Associated Press, “Wayne Thiebaud, painter of cakes and San Francisco cityscapes, dies at 101,” theguardian.com, 12-26-21. Michael Kimmelmann, “Wayne Thiebaud, Playful Painter of the Everyday, Dies at 101,” NYTimes, 12-26-21.

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Minefield of Rabbit Holes

Posted on January 9, 2022 by JMN

In my Arabic grammar I encounter the preposition fiy- illustrated in a “relationship of comparison” (rapport de comparaison).

**mA HayAtu-d-dunyA fiY-l-Akhirati illA maTA(un**: *La vie de ce monde, par rapport à l’autre, n’est que jouissance précaire.* [“The life of this world, compared to the next, is but precarious enjoyment.”] R. Blachère et M. Gaudefroy-Demombynes, “Grammaire de l’Arabe Classique,” 1952).

Blachere’s jouissance is matA( from root m-t-( meaning “to carry away” and, in derived forms, “to enjoy.” Its usages meander through enjoyment, property, and stuff. The notion of “precarious” is absent; however, the syntax example is one of many Blachère takes from the Koran. Julio Cortés points out that the immense corpus of commentary crucially supplements how Koranic terms are understood. The delights of this life are deemed ephemeral by common consent.

Here’s the exploding rabbit hole: My dictionary defines the idiom matA(u-l-mar’a, whose second word means “woman,” as cunnus. It’s tagged anat. for “anatomical.”

There’s an ancient English word for cunnus that’s cognate with French con and Spanish coño. I once mocked Western scholars born in Victorian times who resorted to Latin in citing salty medieval verses (especially those composed by women). I’m less exercised now about Roman empire slang. I confess my mother-tongue’s alternative to cunnus grates on my ear. I’m content to let sleeping Latin lie.

Posted in Anthology, Commentary | Tagged grammar, language, translation | Leave a comment

Rewarded With Provocations

Posted on January 8, 2022 by JMN

**[shA(ir]** *knowing (by instinctive perception), endowed with deeper insight, with intuition… poet.* (Hans Wehr, “A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic,” ed. J Milton Cowan, 1962).

It helps me read contemporary poetry to conjure the mindset of an athlete in the elite sport of pole vaulting. The bar sits there at a distanced height. I summon latency, coil with icy focus, charge the standards, launch myself on the flexing pole, soar contortedly… On a good day I clear the poem and land flushed with endorphins.

When I was half of who I am your voice came along / rewarding me with provocations. It was a fulgor as / beautiful as treasons on the outer banks on another / night. There were horses, wild ones whose thunder / abandoned earth for lattices of successive hoofbeats.
(From “Abraham Lake” by Nathan Spoon, Poetry, October 2020)

Language redolent of fulgors, beautiful treasons, and lattices of hoofbeats can be repulsive or propulsive according to the reader’s readiness and conditioning. I choose my task to be that of honing a sensibility able to submit to being reached by knowers who are worth their salt. I want good verse to affect me, and complacent satisfactions don’t go with the territory.

“As with other great poets, [Louise] Glück does not invite paraphrase.” (Robert Boyers)

“[The reader] may not get it at once but, if he is sufficiently interested, he invariably gets it. (Wallace Stevens)

The best cue may come from my Arabic teacher’s preface to his Spanish translation of the Koran:

“Although it’s true that to translate is to interpret, we separate clearly what’s commonly called interpretation from translation, distinguishing what the Koran ‘says’ from what it ‘seems to mean.’ ”
(Julio Cortés, rest in peace — un saludo, Profesor)

Let translation follow Nathan Spoon, then, where paraphrase fears to tread:

Cuando era la mitad de quien soy llegó tu voz / premiándome con provocaciones. Era un fulgor tan / bello como traiciones en las riberas alejadas de otra / noche. Había caballos, salvajes cuyo trueno / abandonaba la tierra buscando enrejados de cascos ruidosos.
JMN

Posted in Anthology, Commentary, Quotations | Tagged language, personal, poetry, translation | 4 Comments

The Camera Has Spoken. It’s My Turn

Posted on January 5, 2022 by JMN

This gallery contains 1 photo.

And out comes a tenderly belabored prospect of dilapidation. Looking at a photograph I didn’t take, I painted a quaint tranche of unleveled-up Britain from the plein air of the shed I inhabit. Painting my two-bit canvases from photos lets … Continue reading →

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‘The Past Stretched Before Us’

Posted on January 2, 2022 by JMN

I encountered the following expression in my Arabic reference grammar: May you be ransomed by my soul!

[**fudiyta bi-nafsiy**] *puisse-tu être racheté par mon âme!* *(formule de politesse à l’époque classique)* — “Grammaire de l’Arabe Classique,” R. Blachère et M. Gaudefroy-Demombynes, 1952, p. 333.

Arabic can be sublimely terse and florid in the same breath. Blachere’s example shows optative use of the perfect tense instancing how the preposition bi- can introduce the real subject of a passive verb; it’s said to be a formula of courtesy from the classical era. As I checked dictionary meanings for the root f-d-y used in the phrase, my eye passed over phrases illustrating meanings for a different root f-D-D. One of them was the following:

[**faDDa bakArata-hA**] *to deflower a girl* — “Hans Wehr: A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic,” ed. J Milton Cowan, 1966.

Boom — discordance blossoms. The polyvalence of root f-D-D starts at break open and passes through pry, force, undo, pierce. Its complement, from root b-k-r, means virginity.

Dictionaries preserve words somewhat like sediments preserve fossils. Both teach a lot about what has gone before. Deflower may give way to rape in future dictionaries, but that’s contingent on woman’s lot improving outside language, and the past weighs heavily against it.

In her poem “The Garden” Louise Glück writes: … the past, as always, stretched before us, / still, complex, impenetrable.

The comma after still makes it describe the antecedent past; the past is still, i.e., static, unmoving, intransigent. Also complex and impenetrable.

She continues: How long did we lie there / as, arm and arm in their cloaks of feathers, / the gods walked down / from the mountains we built for them?

The verse asserts correlations that elude me; it hints perhaps at the speaker’s rueing in hindsight a supine cluelessness in respect to a vital mystery; interrogating reverence lavished on dashed idols; voicing disillusionment over a failure to perceive cynical affectation, regret at being duped by feigned camaraderie. The possibilities for misperception of the poet’s intention are boundless, but what dwells immutable for now is deflowered girls staring us in the face.

Posted in Anthology, Commentary | Tagged language, personal, reading, translation | Leave a comment

The Struggle to Lose Control

Posted on January 1, 2022 by JMN

To All a Good New Year!

Audrey Petty describes her first one-on-one conference with her poetry teacher Agha Shahid Ali at the University of Massachusetts. After she read her draft to him, he reviewed it and said, “What if you turned this poem around?” She proceeded to invert the lines.

Reading my writing backward felt like abracadabra as the poem revealed something stranger, truer, more distilled in reverse. Language alchemized as the words loosened themselves from my intention. The poem became more of a poem.
From her essay “Revolving in Your Hand,” Poetry, February 2021.

Petty helps me see how I may hobble myself — in words and in pictures — by oversteering toward wished-for outcomes or banal conceits. Maybe my creations would travel further if I could loosen the media (and self) from my intention.

As the calendar flips over, resolution is on the verge of being made: Dare to see more backwards and upside down.

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Don’t Just Stand There. Squint

Posted on December 29, 2021 by JMN

This gallery contains 1 photo.

My approach to Clint is to grace him with a mighty hat and a bodacious cheroot. Outside the frame he’s packing heat, of course. Clint Eastwood personifies a school of movie acting whose slogan is “Don’t just do something. Stand … Continue reading →

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‘Confound, Torment, Swallow Us Whole’

Posted on December 26, 2021 by JMN

Illustration by Nicholas Konrad / The New Yorker

To write, first and foremost, is to choose the words to tell a story, whereas to translate is to evaluate, acutely, each word an author chooses.

Thus starts Jhumpa Lahiri’s essay drawn from the afterword of her translation of “Trust” by Italian novelist Domenico Starnone. Through the prism of a translator’s eye, Lahiri noticed how frequently the Italian word invece (“instead”) appeared in the novel.

Invece invites one thing to substitute for another… I now believe that this everyday Italian adverb is the metaphorical underpinning of Starnone’s novel… “Trust” probes and prioritizes substitution… Invece, a trigger for substitution, is a metaphor for translation itself.

Lahiri’s wide-ranging discussion of the craft of translation includes this assessment:

… Language (or, rather, the combination of language and human usage) is impossible to comprehend at face value. We must enter, instead, into a more profound relationship with words; we must descend with them to a deeper realm, uncovering layers of alternatives. The only way to even begin to understand language is to love it so much that we allow it to confound us, to torment us, until it threatens to swallow us whole.
(Jhumpa Lahiri, “The Book That Taught Me What Translation Was,” The New Yorker, 11-6-2021)

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The Moons of Poesis

Posted on December 25, 2021 by JMN

Cover design by Gretchen Achilles. Cover art: “Saturn,” from a 1985 mezzotint by the artist Vija Celmins.

When reading poetry I try to think like astronomers. They are a doughty lot, trucking with the unexpected, stalking questions that defy asking.

“What I really hope for is something we don’t expect” [John Mather, Goddard Space Flight Center, on what he’s looking forward to studying with the James Webb telescope]… “The [Webb] telescope was built to answer questions we didn’t know we had.” [Klaus Pontoppidan, astronomer with the Space Telescope Science Institute].
(Dennis Overbye, “Webb Telescope Prepares to Ascend, With an Eye Toward Our Origins,” NYTimes, 12-20-21)

“The universe is queerer than we can suppose,” said Arthur Eddington.

I encounter poetry that emits a waveform outside my sensory range. It triggers an attraction-repulsion quandary. Do I try to sharpen my sensors and orbit it to pick up signals? Or do I blow past it and keep prowling for detectible mass and gravity?

I’m currently in orbit around Louise Glück.

… Waveside, beside earth’s edge, / Before the toward-death cartwheel of the sun, / I dreamed I was afraid and through the din / Of birds, the din, the hurricane of parting sedge / Came to the danger lull. / The white weeds, white waves’ white / Scalps dissolve in the obliterating light. / And only I, Shadrach, come back alive and well.
(From “The Inlet,” in “Louise Glück: Poems 1962-2012”)

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Paula Rego Likes to Work

Posted on December 22, 2021 by JMN

“Possession I,” from 2004. Art work © Paula Rego / Courtesy Collection Fundação de Serralves, Museu de Arte Contemporânea.

Portuguese-born artist Paula Rego (b. 1935) studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, London. She lives in the UK.

Quotable saying: “Doing work, that is to say, drawing, is an erotic activity.”

Anna Russell writes that the urgency of Rego’s work “in all its savage, tactile vitality” is keenly apparent in her large pastel portraits.

The Pillowman,” from 2004. Art work © Paula Rego.

After years of collage, oil paint, and acrylic, switching to pastel was a revelation. (She has called the stick “fiercer, much more aggressive” than the brush.)
(Anna Russell, “The Fury and Mischief of Paula Rego,” The New Yorker, 7-7-21)

I’m intrigued by the skewed angles in both paintings; the prominence of the sofa in “Possession I”; that of weirdly inexplicable objects and detail in “The Pillowman.” Is the latter a surreal takeoff on descent from the cross?

Posted in Commentary | Tagged art, drawing, language, painting | 5 Comments