Raoul Dufy, Fred Williams, John Preston, Sylvia Plath, Marianne Moore, and Charles Bowden
Raoul Dufy was a French painter with an imaginative and fluent style. Besides painting, he worked in fabric and tapestry design, ceramic decoration, wood engravings and lithography. His larger works included stage sets and murals, particularly his fresco for the Exposition Internationale. Dufy was inspired by the sea, first in his hometown of Le Havre and later when he was living by the Mediterranean. He painted the sea goddess Amphitrite numerous times and designed two tapestries featuring her image, with the 1936 version showing the goddess holding a scallop shell to the ear. He even painted her image on the bathroom door of a Paris mansion. Fred Williams' succinct marks in his minimalist painting style summarized the landscape of Australia's interior in earth colors, but his work depicting the coast proved to be an exception with a palette of blues and greens. Many of these works were strip gouaches that Deborah Hart, in her book Fred Williams: Infinite Horizons, described as an effort by the artist to return to nature after his involvement with minimalism. References to blue pervade Sylvia Plath's remarkable poem "The Moon and the Yew Tree." She wrote that the "light of the mind" is cold and blue and that the clouds are "flowering blue." In the last stanza, she concluded that "the saints will be all blue, floating on their delicate feet over cold pews, their hands and faces stiff with holiness." (John Preston in The Dig stated that " I felt like one of the apostles from a medieval wall painting whose feet hang in the air, limp and white, to show how they are being blown about by divine winds.") Conjuring up images of blue and green in "The Fish", Marianne Moore invoked "crow-blue mussel-shells", "ink-bespattered jellyfish, crabs like green lilies", and shafts of sunlight "like spun glass...illuminating the turquoise sea." In his book The Blue Desert, Charles Bowden claimed that even the desert can be blue. While hiking through the desert at night, he found that the "ocotillo waves blue wands." Initially the color was ahead of him but then he entered it "like water" and then "everything is awash with a rich, bright blue." Which examples of blue and green would you choose? "The Moon and the Yew Tree" was published in 1961 by Harper & Row in Ariel. The poem can also be found on the All Poetry website. Moore's poem was first published in 1918 but I found it in The Poems of Marianne Moore published in 2005 by Penguin Classics. The Dig was published in 2007 by Viking. Charles Bowden covered crime for the Tucson Citizen newspaper and edited City Magazine when I lived in Tucson. He revealed Charles Keating's part in the savings and loan scandal as well as the dark side of life in the desert along the Mexican border. The Blue Desert was published by the University of Arizona Press in 2018.
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AuthorI am a Northwest artist making collages from mulberry papers stamped by hand from original images that I have carved. Archives
April 2024
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