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  • A RED FLOWER

  • Some time ago I met a friend from high school.

  • His name is Marco. He made me a gift, a book of poems written by his uncle Franco

  • whose title is \"Come passa il vento fra i rami\" [\"The way wind blows through the branches\"].

  • He also asked me to make a painting on one or more of his uncle's poems and told me I was completely free to decide among them.

  • And yes, I forgot to say that he also convinced me to make a video on the making of the painting.

  • A painting about a poem...

  • As a student at the Academy of fine arts I studied art and painting and I also focused on the subject of \"poetry\" and \"prose\",

  • on what is our concept of poetry and prose and how can painting speak about them.

  • Octavio Paz, a great poet, used to say that poetry is such when each word keeps more meanings,

  • all the meanings that such word can have.

  • A poet is actually able to free all the evocative strength of words,

  • whereas in prose or in narrative each word has to keep a univocal meaning,

  • the exact meaning that an author needs to go on with his story.

  • In prose all words have to obey to one meaning,

  • while in poetry words are free and such freedom of meaning is the heart of poetry.

  • The same thing applies to painting: colours and shapes can be used like words are used.

  • I don't want to keep more on this subject, so I come to my conclusions: as a painter, I definetly consider myself a prosaic painter.

  • Just to give you an idea: if I was a writer, I would write novels, and not poems,

  • where words can merrily flutter here and there and say one thing and then another one.

  • I would use words like slaves who have to carry a stone and to place it in the right place to build the great pyramid of narration.

  • So I didn't know how to behave in front of my friend's request: I wanted to connect the painting to the world of poetry, where words are free,

  • but as I said I don't like to give such freedom to shapes and colours, that are the words in painting.

  • I rather like to give them a precise descriptive rationality, to describe things as they are,

  • no flutterings, just plain reality.

  • Well...then I started reading the book looking for a poem that might be source of inspiration for a painting

  • \"first love\"

  • a sparkle in your eyes / like wood dew under / the first sun

  • \"rose thief\"

  • you tell me who I am? / what I am doing?

  • I live / but this is not the life / I want to live

  • \"outskirts\"

  • and buildings are cubes / and streetlights are candles / people's coffins

  • \"black and white\"

  • a white point in a black background / It may seem a small thing / but it's the whole world

  • And then, I came across a drawing among those that go with the poems.

  • This drawing refers to the poem \"Loosen your hair\"

  • and it cought my attention while I was still thinking about the relationship between poetry and prose.

  • In this drawing, made by the author Franco Rossi, a line traces a girl's face

  • while other lines move all around and trace her hair forming a wild mass.

  • I believe that this drawing unifies in a single image what I intend for prose and poetry,

  • The line of the face is precise, has a road to trace and cannot vary, if not a little bit, otherwise it would lose its meaning:

  • this line is prose.

  • Can you see it is a slave? It is subdued in any single curve to its inevitable course. Nose, mouth, chin...

  • On the other hand, the lines of the hair are poetry, free words...

  • They also have a meaning, each line is a hair, but they can be drawn so freely!

  • They can go anywhere, bend and curve as they like, any single hair cannot be more hair than the other.

  • Differently from the girl's profile, the beauty of the hair is not in the precision of the shape,

  • but in the richness of signs, in... in the joy of the drawing itself,

  • that encloses the author's emotions and refers to the poem that was source of its inspiration: \"Loosen your hair\".

  • The great french poet Paul Valery used to say that prose marches, and poetry dances

  • And then, can you see? The lines of the hair are so free that some of them start like hair

  • and then go on into the background losing their small precise meaning

  • until they become completely abstract lines and pure drawing, almost decoration.

  • To distinguish them from the hair is almost impossible.

  • Within such crazy freedom of the hair lines, we need one single prosaic line to give meaning to the whole drawing:

  • if we deleted such line that traces the profile and gives meaning to the drawing, what would remain?

  • Who would tell us that those entangled lines are hair?

  • We feel enchanted but also puzzled by such whirl of signs.

  • Therefore that single line is like the meaning's sheet anchor in the sea of craziness.

  • Yes, I like the idea of relationship between poetry and prose that the drawing suggests to me,

  • and the subject of hair will be my support and my anchor when I lean out of the world of prose and rationality

  • to step on the world of poetry and craziness.

  • I would say that for a prosaic painter hair can be like a Sunday journey, an exception to the rule, the Carnival,

  • when nature in her own realism abandons her strictness and relax for a while.

  • During the days I was considering such ideas, I discovered that they were not totally original.

  • At the end of the 19th century the German historian and art critic Aby Warburg wrote an essay on Botticelli's masterpiece The Birth of Venus.

  • He believed that even during Renaissance, a period in which the rationality of closed and precise shape, \"the Apollonian figure\",

  • and I could say the \"prosaic figure\" dominated the field of painting and figurative arts,

  • it was often through objects moved by the wind, usually hair or draping,

  • that the artist set himself free from the stylistic yoke and dedicated himself to images free from rationality.

  • Thanks to their movement the artist could be closer to emotions, feelings, and also mystery and anxiety,

  • to what Warburg calls -- referring to the painting -- intensified life or feeling formula, the Dionysiac moment of images,

  • that I could also call the \"moment of poetry\".

  • The shapes of the goddess of beauty are closed in dark and very marked lines, typical of Botticelli,

  • and outline the body with surgical precision.

  • It's in the goddess' hair that such formal rules start to break, and even if in some parts hair are tied up with ribbons,

  • they are too many to be tamed. The wind blows and free them from any constraint.

  • So hair can be painted like loosen and free lines that do not obey to strict rules

  • and in these movements the painter's brush finally finds its moment of anarchy.

  • So, to resume:

  • I will base my work on the drawing that goes with the poem \"Loosen your hair\" and I will make a personal version,

  • where the hair will be the centre of the painting since they are the place where poetry ca be painted within a context that will inevitably be prosaic,

  • and I say inevitably because - if it is still not clear-- I like reality and I like painting it as it is,

  • and I cannot do anything about it.

  • And yet the poem \"Loosen your hair\" does not totally convince me.

  • I can't see a definite painting image in it...

  • I can see it instead in the following poem, called \"A red flower\".

  • So I decide to use the poem \"A red flower\" as my base for the image by insisting on the element of loosen hair,

  • since this poem talks about hair, too.

  • Those few verses describe a person, recalled from far memories, who has a red flower in her dark hair,

  • a smiling face, in the bloom of youth, with an avid mouth, a life like music of sea waves...

  • Now, the image I want to paint is clear: a whole figure, walking on the surface of the water and coming towards myself,

  • she is smiling, she has long loose hair decorated by a red flower.

  • Mmh...not too bad,

  • but maybe I'd better give up the self-portrait this time.

  • I could ask to a friend,

  • yes, it's better...

  • Now I need to chose and eventually elaborate the image that will be painted...

  • I took a lot of pictures of Giulia, my friend that kindly accepted to be my model,

  • and all the pictures show her whole figure -- as I had decided -- walking by the sea with a red flower in her loose hair, of course...

  • I make a first skimming by evaluating the background, the pose, the expression, the hair movement,

  • looking for the closest picture to the image that the poet may have had in his mind when he wrote \" a red flower\".

  • But those images do not convince me. More than risking to make a painting that could be perfect for a Harmony novel cover

  • -- a risk that I have been fearing since the beginning --

  • it suddenly seems to me that a life-size painting of a girl walking by the sea is an image too rich,

  • with too many things told for too long if compared to a short poem of a few verses that was the source of my inspiration.

  • Eugenio Montale used to say that poetry is an emotion and emotions cannot last more than 45 minutes...

  • Now, that image seemed to last 45 minutes...too much stuff.

  • So to be more faithful to the characteristics of the poem I decide to focus only on the fundamental elements,

  • especially on the red flower on one side and on the loose hair on the other side.

  • Both the elements will develop around the focal point: Giulia's face, her portrait.

  • I start evaluating all the images by considering only the face, not the pose or the background, and then I chose a picture.

  • Now there's the question of the backgrounds to be solved.

  • First of all, I want the background to be reduced at its minimum and I leave only a clean sky, a great blue background, like in the pictures.

  • It is a minimalist choice to enhance the isolation and the synthetic strength that an image needs to have.

  • Initially, I thought to paint the line of the sea or a cloud but then I decided to leave the colour pure

  • in order to move it away as much as possible from the acknowledgment of its natural meaning of sky

  • and to move it towards the purity of colour itself.

  • If I painted the sea or a cloud, the background would be immediately recognizable as sky.

  • Instead, I would like the colour to be enjoyed at least for a second without giving it a precise meaning,

  • so that one can question about it and wonder if any other colour existed before it,

  • before understanding that it is nothing else than a clear blue sky.

  • And I want a lot of background, a lot of blue, all around the girl so that she remains isolated and unreachable.

  • Given that this subject risks, as I said, the Harmony cover effect,

  • I believe that this composition with a lot of empty background overcomes the risk by making the portrait less banal and by increasing its poetical strength.

  • And, be aware, the poetical strength is not poetry... but this is another story.

  • I start with a preparatory drawing.

  • It helps to get familiar with the image... As if it was your first meeting,

  • you familiarize yourself with the shapes of the drawing and the values of chiaroscuro

  • and you consider the final dimensions of the painting and the elements that will form it.

  • Even if it is often undervalued, the dimension of a painting is actually one of the more important aspects.

  • In this case it is even fundamental to understand the relationship between figure and background.

  • And now the painting: canvas placement.

  • On a well outstretched canvas you spread several layers of a glue and plaster mix.

  • In this way, the cotton canvas can receive, absorb and keep the oil colour in the right manner.

  • As poems trace rapid and fleeting sketches, and do not go into details

  • since precision means prose and it's their enemy,

  • I also paint a layer of rapid, light and little defined sketches. Especially in the hair,

  • I just sketch the image so that it gets closer to the poem from which it comes from.

  • You had a red flower/ in your silky black hair/

  • you had a red flower/ on your young and warm heart/

  • and life was beautiful and fresh and alive/

  • like the song of the foam of the sea/

  • and life was beautiful and eternal/

  • like the vermilion flower of your avid mouth/ of youth/

  • you had a red flower/

  • a red flower/

  • you had.

  • From an idea of MARCO ROSSI

  • Subtitles by FRANCESCA GRASSIA

  • Musics by A. PONCHIELLI, G. DONIZETTI, G. PUCCINI, G. ROSSINI

  • \"a red flower\" and all the other poems taken from \"The way wind blows through the branches\" are read by the author FRANCO ROSSI

  • model: GIULIA DALL'ARA

  • video, texts, images, and voice by ELVIS SPADONI

A RED FLOWER

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赤い花 (Un fiore rosso - A Red Flower)

  • 15 1
    silongyang080 に公開 2021 年 01 月 14 日
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