"Moi aussi, je suis peintre"--Apollinaire
About a year ago I purchased a GIANT Moleskin notebook at the Pompidou Center's spectacular bookstore with the vague idea that I would use the book to make some sort of one-off artpoetry book. "Play!" it invited me. But we all know how these things go--you get home then life takes over--the effort to make a single book just for me got shuffled under a million other "more important" things. The Moleskin was shelved.
But a few weeks ago, back at the Pompidou Center for the tail end of the Anselm Keiffer show, as I sat in one of the rooms and scribbled the draft of a poem, then shifted to another room and wrote a mini short story, the notebook came to mind once more. Keiffer's work evoked language, cited it, was crossed with it, or alluded to books and authors. But most significantly it awoke my own desire to play visually--to be the writer who let in the bit of the visual artist--to scribble over the pages, to dig into them with charcoal, to mash word and line into and perhaps even through surfaces.
So, in an effort to not care whether the painting is sloppy or amateur, I began today the 176-page long Moleskin book as a sort of spring mental cleaning--reading and rereading old journals of the past year, I plucked out lines and fragments and painted and wrote, charcoaled and pasteled over and into the paint, collaged, glued a photo clipping I have had on my writing desk for the past years into the opening page. Thus I have begun the Moleskin one-off visual book exploration. To make me feel less insular in this process, I have also decided to post images of the pages as I go, even if they are childsplay--parce que, moi aussi, je suis peintre! Merci Anselm Keiffer et merci Apollinaire.
May 8th 2016: Day 1 image 1:
"THAT WHICH IS NOT BODY IN ONE ROOM BECOMES
THAT WHICH IS NOT WORD IN ANOTHER"
(30x84cm//11.75x33". Mixed medium--acrylic, collaged papers and black and white photo 'Holland House Library after the bombing of London', permanent marker, glue)
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