1 Stains

            At the venerable Fine Arts Academy in Krakow there was in 2019 an exhibition of students’ drawings, all done in black on white, dating from the early nineteenth century, together with some students’ notebooks describing the pedagogic practices they’d endured in the 1890s and the early 1900s. One drawing tutor, making his formal rounds of his pupils’ work, would announce that any drawing on paper was a ‘stain’ between the true poles of blackness and whiteness. The tolerable stain, or better the accomplished stain, should gauge and then hit its finest balance between these antitheses.

            It struck me that this could be equally true for the poem, which is also a stain between its poles; an indiscriminately word-covered darkness, the thick blackness of airless language – and opposing it, a white and wordless silence.

            Then the ‘relation’ between visual art and poetry, so often pursued in the name of interdisciplinarity, wouldn’t be a relation at all, but instead would lie in their common tendency to form ‘stains’ along a spectrum.

            There’s something attractive about this notion of a stain, or of staining, which has inglorious connotations of smearing and spoiling and disfiguring, yet also pertains to techniques of embellishment – to colouring-in or varnishing or gilding or dyeing.

            Shelley offers such a hovering action in his elegiac poem ‘Adonais’, where it stems from life:

Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments.

            Here’s a short piece of contemporary staining. My subject is post-war illegitimacy, attempted stoicism, parental violence, the risks of flamboyant self-display of the martyred self, and sung Texan cliché – but all done satirically-brightly, in bleeding and seeping colours:

Lone Star Clattering

What got done to me stains

through my hopes of passing

as fully human – though my

‘bad blood’ won’t gloss that;

to canter around its crimson

rosette would tart up a harm

more my postwar bad luck

than a told shame’s mother.

Still, the pose: Say yellow rose

go hard & plain to Amarillo.

They have shot me down! 

Yet do I rise, a tad orange.

2  Envy of colour; the parasite

            In the much-aired Frank O’Hara poem from 1956, ‘Why I am not a painter’, he writes ‘I think I would rather be a painter but I am not’. After this enticing start, he drops his note of occupational envy to go on to ‘similarities’ – but in what neither of them, poet or painter, actually make. So, though under the banners of O’Hara’s mentions of ‘oranges’ or Mike Goldberg’s painting ‘Sardines’, the things referred to, be they sardines or oranges, aren’t any longer there in either of their finished pieces. (The thought of titles which don’t refer to their content brings us to Wallace Stevens, who supposedly kept a desk drawer full of titles for potential but unwritten poems; his daughter found them after he died.)

            For myself, I’d have liked O’Hara’s poem to have been about colour envy, or about his jealousy of those who work with the medium of paint, not words. But it isn’t. It starts off with the promise or the threat of ekphrasis; but then it isn’t that, either.

            Ekphrasis, of late broadly rehabilitated in poetry, used to be considered naff. Why was that? Ekphrasis simply means, or recently was primarily used to mean, a description in words of some seen object, a landscape, a sky, a village, a person. Tedium could easily shadow it; a tedium of, say, excessive topographical description in the novel.

            Despite such hovering naffness – or rather, incorporating it – my own writing, has adapted the visual work for instance of Gillian Ayres and Ian McKeever, or Watteau in his figure of ‘Pierrot’ or ‘Gilles’, or Samuel Palmer. And of Andrea Mantegna, Piero della Francesca, and other Italian painters from the very earliest through to Tiepolo’s malicious yellows. (I’d like to have used Willem de Kooning’s terrific canvas, ‘Rosy-Fingered Dawn at Louse Point’ but its title’s far too strong already.)

            I see the extent of my thieving now, but only in retrospect; it was never my aim to use these paintings. They appeared uninvited or they flashed up, but without my willing them to. The resulting poems do draw on these canvases, though not by way of directly describing their content or their style – rather, as a summoning or invocation of their colour, especially its almost tactile qualities, or its heat or its coolness.

            My own practical relation, I mean to those artworks that I’ve stood in front of, isn’t so much ekphrastic as it is parasitic.

3 Binding

            In the past I’ve periodically nicked some lines from Manlio Brusatin’s A History of Colour which dates from the 1990s, and Goethe’s colour theory of 1810 with its sentences such as ‘blue brings the principle of darkness with it’ and ‘there is nowhere further back than blue’. I do, though, acknowledge such borrowings by adding footnotes to the poems. As to the Goethe, Wittgenstein rather tartly writes that it isn’t a theory of colour – which is true enough – but then he, Wittgenstein, goes on to say that Goethe’s is actually a ‘phenomenology’ and therefore not much good. Well, we could definitely unearth something to say in defence of a phenomenology of colour; but Wittgenstein’s discussion is really about the grammar of colour-concepts, and what is and isn’t coherently nameable. 

            (I can’t resist adding that Goethe included a subsection titled ‘Dread of Theory’: ‘A dread of, nay, a decided aversion for all theoretical views respecting colour and everything belonging to it, has been hitherto found to exist among painters; a prejudice for which, after all, they were not to be blamed; for what has been hitherto called theory was groundless, vacillating, and akin to empiricism. We hope that our labours may tend to diminish this prejudice, and stimulate the artist practically to prove and embody the principles that have been explained.’) 

            Goethe’s characterisations of colour are the most luminous of sentences.  They pull me back to the question of how to deploy the name of a colour word, to actually make the colour glow on the page, both as and in the word itself. I’m inclined to think that ‘colour words’ are immediately laden with their own emotionality, too. They’re yet another instance of the already-affective nature of language. They do far more than just point at, or describe; they embody.

4  Egging

            Here’s an extract from the late poet John James’ work; this mildly sardonic and ironically-titled  ‘A Theory of Poetry’ is really a pragmatics of poetry – in which he writes of getting the poem held by bands of verbal colour running across it:

‘It’s very important
to make your lines
bands of alternating colour
running from one side to the other

these will bind
your poem together
like an egg
& make it exist’

            So the stripes of colour are functioning like eggs in a cake mix or a pancake batter, by making the words bind, stick in a convincing-feeling mass … or if the egg were to stay external to the lines, like a striped painted Easter egg.

            But then, before the advent of oil paint, colour itself would have been made up into tempera by using egg with powdered pigment. (To think both of ‘tempera’ and of ‘cooking’ pulls the hungry mind straight to the Japanese technique of cooking egg-battered things, tempura). Tempera was the main medium for nearly every painter in the European medieval and early renaissance period up to around 1500. Its colours were less saturated than those of oil paint, but its pigments stayed more faithful over time. The word itself comes from pingere a tempera (meaning ‘to paint’ in Italian, plus from the Latin temperare, ‘to mix thoroughly in the proper proportions’). The commonest form was egg tempera; egg yolk, plus some binding agent to stop it flaking and cracking – maybe water, sometimes melted wax, even vinegar. The same Wikipedia entry which told me all this adds: ‘When used to paint icons on church walls, liquid myrrh is sometimes added to the mixture to give the paint a pleasing odour, particularly as worshippers may find the egg tempera somewhat pungent for quite some time after completion. Tempera paint dries rapidly. It is normally applied in thin, semi-opaque or transparent layers in small brush strokes.’

            Which sounds much like the laborious work of applying several layers of words to the poem. A variant called tempera grassa, or fatty tempera, had extra egg and oil mixed in. ‘Over-egging’ still stands as a warning or a reproach to us all. That is, don’t over-egg your work with too much fatty tempera – else you’ll end up with a claggy pudding of a poem.

In sum:

            The ‘staining’ gets done by both verbal and visual work. Both are their smudges, smears, tinges and stripes, poised somewhere between the poles of emptiness and suffocating fullness.

            The ‘egging’ comprised the earliest pigments for panel painting, yet could also describe the adding of verbal colour to the poem. Conversely both paintings and poems might become over-egged through an excess of embellishment, stirred into the mix to persuade viewers and readers.

            The ‘binding’ is the working of whatever emulsifying or holding agent wraps round the verbal or the visual thing – into adhering to, then shaping itself.

            So painterly and poetic work, if brought together side by side, needn’t entice fretful concerns about their ‘relationship’ or about their implications for ‘interdisciplinarity’.

            Staining, egging, and binding are gerunds. They could be plain instances of actions held in common.

Note: a longer version of this piece commissioned by Enclave Review (Cork, Ireland) should appear in Autumn 2024