Friday, March 25, 2005

The Nature of Poetry

About three weeks ago, Roy Arenella read a posting of mine about creating art in nature, and he responded with this photocard created out of a photograph (from 26 Feb 1998) upon which he had etched a single tmetically altered word.


Roy Arenella, "DRA" (Winter 2004)

The caption incorporated into the image defines the thin white superstructure of the wing as not a part of nature perceived but a mere (or exalted) drawing of same. Roy's message on the back of the card concerns the difficulty in developing "visual poetries for nature."

un violon d'ingres

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

geOf, With my apartment filled with a labyrinthe of stacked, packed boxes of all shapes & sizes --in preparation for our move out of here in May-- & with my workroom 3/4s dismantled & packed away, I'm resorting to an email response to this blog post about my card "dRAw ing".
Actually the image isnt a photograph but is more like a photogram. In the standard example of the latter an object, placed on photographic paper & then exposed to a flash of light, blocks or partially shadows the surface of the paper from that light, causing a design on it --a "drawing" in various tones from white, thru grey to black, made directly with light.
In my picture, the wing of a cicada was placed in the enlarger & functions as a negative would, throwing an enlarged, light-dark reversed,image of the wing onto the photo paper.
I usually dont feel the need to make "corrections" concerning my pictures, but in this case it seems necessary --in order to taste the full flavor of the title, "dRA wing".
Best, r0y

Geofhuth said...

r0y,

Correction appreciated. Now that I think about it, of course this is a photogram (tho a Royogram instead of a Rayogram). This should've occurred to me, but I'm so used to reversing the polarity of an image on the computer, that I just assumed the same (ridiculously enough) in this case!

Geof