Justin and I put together a little creative project a couple weeks ago. We went to D.I. to find a frame for the Picasso painting I received for Christmas (Guernica). We knew the poster was pretty big, so we took our time, looking for a few weeks to find just the right frame.
Finally, we found a white-and-gold art frame with a painting in it. It was an old style desert landscape. An art print of an oil painting--very much like the oil painting landscapes that grandma and grandpa have at their house--lots of green and yellow. We imagined that we'd just slide the Picasso in over the existing painting in the frame and put it up on the wall. When we got home, we realized a couple of problems. One, the Picasso (black and white) looked silly and washed out in the white and gold frame. Two, the frame was actually much too big for the poster--we'd have to put in additional matting around the poster, which we really didn't want to do, matting is so expensive, and the poster was really special, not the kind of thing a person could matte with sheets of construction paper.
Meanwhile, we'd had a good laugh at the back of the desert landscape painting--a thin particle board with a very amateur half-done painting on it. Cheap paint was used probably by a high school art student, or any non-professional just having fun. At the top, a dramatic, fantastical sunset in orange and blue and yellow, with black ominous clouds; to the left a great and spacious building of stacked-up, pueblo-style architure, brown stucco walls, red, rounded doorways. Poor attempts at a 3-effect. At the bottom, a fluffy, green blob, possibly meant to represent a bush. To the right, streaks of random color, maybe someone had been testing the paint, unsure of what colors would come out. Justin and I, as a joke, placed the Picasso poster on this underbelly of the desert landscape painting. Then we looked down at it. And looked up at each other. We laughed. And both knew that this was the answer, the true destiny for our Picasso.
I carefully cut the Picasso painting out of its white poster background and centered and pasted it to the amateur painting. I spray-painted the frame black, to bring out the dramatic contrasts in the Picasso. On the undone spaces of the amateur painting, the parts where no paint had ever touched the flat, particle board surface, I scrawled depressing, war poetry in pencil (to add to the effect of despair). Some e.e. cummings, some Charles Boudelaire, some T.S. Eliot, some Walt Whitman, a paragraph from a novel about Hiroshima, and a poem of my own. and Voila! A beautifully dramatic abstract modernist commentary on war and violence as the new focal point for our room. After we put it up, we stared at it for several minutes in awed reverence. "This is really beautiful, honey," Justin said, "a real piece of art."
For your reading pleasure, here are the poems/excerpt from the painting:
T.S. Eliot (From The Waste Land, a tedious, modernist poem about the depressing face of post-WWI America):
April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Walt Whitman (From Pioneers! O Pioneers! Expressing the violence and vigor of Manifest Destiny--he thought his encouragement of Western Expansion was quite noble, I use it in this collection, because I find it sick, and ironic considering the fact that it was not just trees, but Native Americans who were the victims of several pioneer movements):
Come my tan-faced children,
Follow well in order, get your weapons ready,
Have you your pistols? Have you your sharp-edged axes?
Pioneers! O Pioneers!
Charles Baudelaire (The most highly acclaimed depressing French Poet of the canon of literature. This is the English translation):
O, Death: old captain, it is time!
Let us raise anchor!
This country bores us, O Death!
Let us set sail!
Though the sky and the sea are black as ink,
our hearts are filled with rays!
Pour us your poison, so that it comforts us!
e.e. cummings (The postmodernist who always finds contentment in his exploratory writings about despair):
Faithfully tinying at twilight voice
of death earth's innumerable doom
againing (yes by microscopic yes)
acceptance of irrevocable time
particular pure truth of experience heard
above the everywhereing facts of fear;
and under any silence of each bird
who dares to not forsake a failing year
--now, quite before your whisper's whisper is
subtracted from my hope's own hope, receive
(undaunted guest of dark most downwardness
and marvellously self diminuitive
whose universe a single leaf maybe,
the more than thanks of always merest me
Quote from Hiroshima:
The day before the bomb, I went for a swim. In the morning, I was eating peanuts. I saw a light. I was knocked to a little sister's sleeping place. When we were saved, I could only see as far as the tram. My mother and I started to pack our things. The neighbors were walking around burned and bleeding.
Me (This is a poem about many things. Mostly about how my disgust for war and violence is making me want to be vegetarian. Also, about my annoyance at President Obama for accepting the Nobel Peace prize, when we knew that sending a few thousand more troops into Iraq just before accepting the prize was dishonorable.):
She,
of whom it is said would,
in a million sentences about years,
never take an axe in hand against,
much more than a cherry tree, an
innocent, running sans head chicken,
or any chicken for that matter,
is no more innocent of bar-B-que finger-licking
than the man who accepted the Nobel Peace Prize
for ordering only a few thousand more friends, Romans, Countrymen
into the
out of the frying pan and
into the
hands of Macbeth, his wife, and other red-fingered Fates.
I hope rather than getting sad by these literary excursions, you think of them as important social commentary--just one more effort to inspire the community with feelings of anti-violence and other optimistic Ghandi-isms.
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