Jane: Dérive and Final Project

So I went on my dérive with Carmen and our friend Ursula, on the most beautiful of Easter Sundays. While Carmen was being sneaky taking pictures of numbers unbeknownst to me, my own dérive adopted a much looser, open-minded structure...I started taking pictures of things I found beautiful (buildings, flowers), interesting (a bike lock, a children's play toy). Part of my walk found beauty in the unexpected: how often do we actually examine the places we live, stop to look before going about our lives? Another sought stories. A love-seat built for two sat peaceful and empty on a porch, and it was so apparently custom made, the size so particular, it seemed as if it could only fit one couple in the world: an image of soulmates. I photographed a statue of Jesus at the end of a driveway who held out his arms as if waving in the car in front of him, the most holy of parking attendants. But really, it was the camera in my hand that shaped my walk. I would never have stopped everywhere I did without it, if I didn't have the promise of preserving a snapshot. The camera was a third eye, hand held, and it mediated my walk. How might my journey have changed if I held a sketch book? Or a video camera, or for that matter, a camera that used film, one that would demand I take more care in choosing my subjects and frames? What would I have seen, chosen to document, what would I have done, where would I have gone differently? Questions that beg experimentation...

This bike's not going anywhere.

The Art of the Playground

Rapunzel!

Darling buds of May, upward-facing.

A seat, in love.

Park and be blessed.

....Which leads me to the topic of my final project. I really want to continue painting: it's been so fun working with color, playing with a medium that has such a variety of moods and textures with so many possibilities. When it came to subject matter, I took the idea of finding beauty in the unexpected and thought immediately of Pablo Neruda's Odas elementales, a series of poems about everyday objects which capture them in breathtaking images. In the style of the ode, these are poems of praise for those things we typically overlook in the day to day. I plan to take a selection of these odes and illustrate them with oils on small gesso boards, experimenting especially with color to bring a new perspective to objects generally thought as mundane. I want to play especially with Neruda's imagery, almost as an act of translation between linguistic and artistic imagery. 

This is one of the images I plan to use, which I'm sharing here because I love it so much. It is from Neruda's "Ode to the Lemon":

we opened

two halves

of a miracle,

congealed acid

trickled

from the hemispheres

of a star,

the most intense liqueur

of nature,

unique, vivid,

concentrated,

born of the cool, fresh

lemon,

of its fragrant house,

its acid, secret symmetry.

What can I say? Gives me chills.