“Stuff your eyes with wonder… live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.”
– Ray Bradbury (August 22, 1920 – June 5, 2012)
Art by Charles Caryl Coleman.
“Faeries are associated with wild untamed nature, with art, and with death – so the folklore is rich with different stories to explore”
– Holly Black
Art by John Simmons.
“Art isn’t only a painting. Art is anything that’s creative, passionate, and personal. An artists is someone who uses bravery, insight, creativity, and boldness to challenge the status quo. Art is a personal gift that changes the recipient. The medium doesn’t matter. The intent does. Art is a personal act of courage, something one human does that creates change in another.”― Seth Godin
Art by Eyvind Earle.
“We all have our time machines, don’t we? Those that take us back are memories, and those that carry us forward are dreams.”
– H.G. Wells
Art by Gian Andri Bezzola.
“Great love is never justified. It’s like the little tree that springs up in some inexplicable fashion on the side of a cliff: where are its roots, what does it feed on, what miracle produces those green leaves?”
– Wisława Szymborska (July 2, 1923–February 1, 2012), the Polish Nobel laureate
Art by Christian Birmingham.
Writing anything original is art whether it is a review, a letter, an email, a cover letter, a presentation, a poem … Everything is art because it is a singular assembly of words never written before.
“Author James Elkins writes of the three components necessary for someone to become an artist: seeing, making and the tabula rasa.
First, students need to learn to see. They have to see the world as it is without labels, without knowing the name of what is seen.
Second, they are taught how to make. How to use hands or voice or body to take what they see and reflect it back to the world.
And third, and most difficult, the artist starts with a blank slate. Art must be done for the first time, not repeated, and that first stroke, those first words – this is the source of our fear.”
–Seth Godin – The Icarus Deception
First, you are leaving your corporeal body and seeing with inverted eyes to “quiet your cleverness”. Seeing what could be, and not what it is, as in Samuel Butler’s study of hypothetics at the Colleges of Unreason (Erewhon). Turning our own good poetry of the seen into the hypothetical language or the poetry of the unseen.
Second, as in learning how to use our imagination and the words of the unseen to create something first taking shape in ink from your pen.
The last, the most painful and fearsome act, the blank sheet of paper awaiting to be filled by you, by your drawing of new sounds and thoughts. You do not know if it is good, but if you do not know, then it is good.
Have words drop numb at your touch and arrange them in easy-to-carry-in-the-heart images.
The unique magic of Michael Cheval’s imagination is always a source of inspiration.
© Iulia Halatz
I am delighted that five of my poems were included in the Sudden Denouement Anthology Volume I. The anthology is now available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk.
“Light is the left hand of darkness
and darkness the right hand of light.
Two are one, life and death, lying
together like lovers in Kemmer,
like hands joined together,
like the end and the way.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin (October 21, 1929 – January 22, 2018),
The Left Hand of Darkness
Art by Édouard Manet.
Longing = a yearning desire.
“It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.”
– George Eliot
Art by Aleksandr Golovin.
Mistake = an act or judgement that is misguided or wrong.
“I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes.
Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You’re doing things you’ve never done before, and more importantly, you’re Doing Something.
So that’s my wish for you, and all of us, and my wish for myself. Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody’s ever made before. Don’t freeze, don’t stop, don’t worry that it isn’t good enough, or it isn’t perfect, whatever it is: art, or love, or work or family or life.” – Neil Gaiman
Art by Gertrude Alice Kay.
Hurdle = one of a series of upright frames over which athletes in a race must jump; a problem or difficulty that must be overcome.
“Love is a tenacious adventure… Real love is one that triumphs lastingly, sometimes painfully, over the hurdles erected by time, space and the world.” – Alain Badiou
Art by Andrea Kowch.
