Poems are Animals
Top: Dürer, Head of a Roebuck (1503) Watercolor. Bayonne, France
LL: Detail of Dürer's Head of a Roebuck
LR: Detail of Dürer's Self-portrait at 22 (c.1493)
A recent exhibition posted an interesting quote by the poet Ted Hughes. It was somewhat out of their context but in ours because I, of course, argue that true art is like a visual poem. Remember as you read it that although many published poems are true poetry, very few paintings are true art:
“I think of poems as a sort of animal. They have a life of their own, like animals by which I mean that they seem quite separate from any person, even from their author, and nothing can be added to them or taken away without maiming and perhaps even killing them. And they have a certain wisdom. They know something special, something perhaps that we are very curious to learn. Maybe my concern has been to capture not animals particularly and not poems, but simply things which have a vivid life of their own, outside mine.”
Posted 23 Mar 2012: Artists as AnimalsDurerTheory
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