Use of Text in Art: A Gallery of Words

Note: Photo is art by Jolene Beckman www.murmuringmuse.squarespace.com Batavia, NY Her photo was also featured in this issue of TOH...

 

Use of Text in Art: A Gallery of Words

 

      Artists sometimes choose to incorporate text into their art-work. Or they may begin as writers, with good words, their art evolving from a humble phrase-start. Some artists create book or album covers, using the same recipe of art and words, in different variations. Collage artists cut / paste actual rectangles of paper, from newspaper or magazine, bearing words applicable to the subject of their work. Poets often use the space of the page to "exhibit" their poem, sort of leading your eyes around the page as a type of theater. The different ways to combine art and text, two already-eclectic mediums, are endless. Ever tried?

 

      The 100th issue of BOMB magazine appeared in my mailbox in July. Within its literary supplement, I was intrigued by an article titled "Incantations: Songs, Spells and Images by Mayan Women", by Ambar Past. My favorite lines in the entire article talk of the form of Mayan language 'Tzotzil'. "In Tzotzil, to write and to paint are the same verb (tz'ib)... Poetry is called nichimal k'op, ‘the word in flower’." Read BOMB’s“tz'ib” at bombsite.com!

 

      Online artist Mae Jane (a.k.a. The Little Fawn) drew a portrait of her cat "Littlebones" and, in the place of kitty's body, she hand-scrawled connected cursive words, filling that "white-page" void. Her poem begins: "there's a strange seeping void filling up my soul, / it's wild and significant, seeping in every nook…”

 

      Jennifer Sibbert displays online her canvas painting, a combination of word & paint of a more dark, even abstract, nature. Throughout the piece, large dark words creep & crawl like roots or vines, tendrils tangled in among locks of a woman's hair. Her "thinking" face bears no smile, where it appears in a partial profile to the right side of canvas. The quoted words are Ursula K. LeGuin's, "My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool, it gives me all the world and exiles me from it." So true.

 

      The current exhibit of Kathryn Rice Cummings’ work at Perry’s ACWC Gallery includes both traditional and unusual paintings, as well as portraits, some with lengthy titles, designed to lead the viewed further into the artist's world (that is the painting). For example, current exhibiting- artist Kathryn Rice Cummings titles one of her paintings… “A Child’s Set of Charlotte Dolls Were Left after Play on the Forest Floor where They Were Quilted & Were Nested for more than a Century: Undisturbed”, lending even more depth to an already many-layered art piece.

 

      Another online artist, Abby Sernoff, has collaged unusual dimensional papers in the form of a grasshopper, titling it "Uncanny Leaps Forward". Surrounding him are cutout words in leaf-like frames, making up the phrase "The grasshopper can only leap forward, never backwards." Based on a biological truth, the artist was inspired by a dream to share this little truth.

 

      Bethany Butler, Outreach Director of the Arts Council for Wyoming County (NY), commented on T.O.H.’s theme: "[What] about how the creation of poetry and the creation of a painting or other work of art are related? There are poets who made this comparison. And e. e. cummings considered himself a painter above being a poet. [This] is easy to understand when you look at his poetry; a part of the reader's enjoyment and comprehension of a poem by him is in seeing how the poem sits on the page." As an artist, Butler has experimented with text before, incorporating into a painting words handwritten on fragile rice paper. From a distance this only adds depth and, hiding like a secret or a surprise, is hardly noticeable until moving in closer.

 

      Donato Mancini wrote for The Fillip Review an article titled “The Bondo Between Word and Image”. His introduction is right- on: “Simon Morley’s Writing on the Wall” is styled as a major survey of modern art that “traces the growing bond between word and image”. Morley suggests, as Joseph Kusoth said, that language is the “...most suitable means of interrogating hidden assumptions & ideologies lurking beneath apparently purely visual surfaces of art.”

 

      Last, but not least, the much-loved (and published) artist Sabrina Ward Harrison (The True and the Questions: A Journal, Spilling Open, Messy Thrilling Life) has inspired many other artists to "do their own thing". Her self-described quest is "...a search for the living spirit— a quest she undertakes with her hands, her eyes, and her intuitive sensibility. Her work allows a place to unfold, a place to build, a place to reveal and [her work] essentially cries the poetry of life". Since the best artists want their viewers to thrive... on their art, and on that great, albeit sometimes puzzling, "poetry of life", Harrison qualifies! Artist Kelly Rae Roberts, whose work is also featured in T.O.H. (see reverse side), thanks Harrison... & IllustrationFriday.com, a site offering topics / prompts to artists who illustrate... for inspiration.

 

      In closing, I absolutely must quote the poet Hilda Morley (1919-1998) "...Words in my mouth are / astonished; / the sky appears / in a space I'd forgotten / was there." Poetry of life!

 

Orig published in The Other Herald Issue #10 Aug. 2007