Europoems, Padova, march 2014 : "Visual Arts and Poetry" by Cristina Passima Trifon

Poetry is abstract by definition; it works by way of abstractions, codes and signs. Artists who work and express themselves in the domain of the abstract, whatever their particular field might be, touch to poetry, one might say they make poetry. They make poetry starting from poetry. They take key elements from the poem, be they forceful, rough or sharp, they reinterpret, deconstruct  and recompose them so that ultimately, following imaginary laws of the abstract, a totally new work emerge, distinct from its poetical starting point and capable of standing on its own as an autonomous piece of art. I do say it as an artist who often initiated a visual quest   starting from a poem. This is no easy matter, though it might seem like it. In order to better illustrate my point, I shall proceed with describing some of the « ingredients » which I pick from the text of a poem to introduce them into my artistic recipe. I will seek now to explain how I read places, sky, water, light, clouds and there would be others, but I'd rather stop here.

The place rather than the country wherefrom each and every one of us comes is what me for one I try to imagine when you tell me where you hail from. This is what presides to the relationship between the two of us. England, for me, is borderless, not necessarily because of its being an island, but because in my imaginations it accounts for a far larger space than its actual land limits, much more mysterious, with an unchained nature, the green is very sharp, the sky is dim, and the light falls aslant. I do not deem it to be accurate, but this is my image of England.

On a regular basis, sky is reckoned to be blue, but a very specific blue for every place under the sun. The sky is a fixed element. The clouds on the sky do not share the same colour, but they travel in exchange at a more or less rapid, variable pace. There are places where no clouds obscure the sky, take Cyprus, where the sky is very light blue, a strong yet not very intense cloudless blue. All along my stay in Cyprus, a 10-12 days holiday, I did not see one single cloud. The night sky is also very different, very high and diamond-like starlit at the tropics, towards the North Pole it is torn apart into strips, forming the aurora borealis. The sky seen from a plane is a moonlike picture, a world of its own. 

The Mediteranean is a place where ships gently sail on the waterfront taking you from one place to another. One might even hop off to « walk from Chios to Samos », so plainlike are its waters.

The light can be clear or envelopping, coming aslant or vertically, surrounding you or measuring you from aside. It outlines the shape of things or mixes with the atmosphere around. The light can be sunset or sunrise, magic or very picturesque, yet every single time different. It can tell a story or describe a wide variety of diverse and infinite conditions.

Taking all these elements and changing their colour or arranging them differently, we are already making poetry. Indistinct, not linked to commonplace reality, not figured

trough codes pre-established thousands of years ago, somewhat like the Maya alphabet, nice drawings, yet we fail to seize its meaning, its significations, nonetheless we can certainly imagine, without speculating, at least a journey through the places of this world where the sun rises differently each day.

Finally, I even created a composition with all these ingredients and I reckon that we succeeded in understanding each other.

All things that I have just presented are exercises of imagination or admiration that poets, painters, dancers, musicians and sometimes also other fellow humans endowed with artistic feeling perform towards the world that we all would have as better place to live.<br> 

Europoems, Padova, 27.03.2014