Visionary Vibes: A Blog by Aberjhani

The Birth of Elemental, the Power of Illuminated Love

11/15/2016

"The universe said, 'Let me show your soul something beautiful." quote by Aberjhani from ELEMENTAL, the Power of Illuminated Love. (Postered Poets Art Graphics)

The edits on my current book in progress were close to complete when Hurricane Matthew came to town and rearranged my priorities. President-Elect Donald Trump, at the time still a presidential candidate, contributed his fair share of distractions as well but that’s another blog for another time.

Along with its unexpected destructiveness in my hometown, Hurricane Matthew also delivered a few gifts. One of the most important of those gifts for me was the rediscovery of research materials in the form of notebooks from the 1990s long thought lost in the shuffle of previous relocations. The material turned up while storing and salvaging valuable to keep them safe from the hurricane.

The discovery of the notebooks themselves became part of my account––now included in the previously-noted book-in-progress–– of surviving Matthew. One of those notebooks contains an unvarnished story of the birth of ELEMENTAL, the Power of Illuminated Love. Because of the death of Luther E. Vann, my co-creator on the project, earlier this year, the notebook was a startling find.

Discussing the Possibility

Had he lived, Luther would have turned 79 on December 2, 2016, so it seems appropriate that notebooks and early recorded recitals of poems from ELEMENTAL should have started popping up at this time. The excerpt below is taken from notes dated September 11, 1992, more than a year after I first met the painter and sculptor.

At this point, I had been experimenting with writing poems based on his art but this was our first time discussing the possibility of working on a book together. Also during this period, comparing our developing friendship to the meeting between Jalal al-Din Rumi and Shams Tabrizi helped me visualize the possibility of working with an artist who had been practicing his craft much longer than I had been plying mine.

Detail from "For the Love of the Poet" painting by Luther E. Vann featured in Elemental the Power of Illuminated Love.)

Called Luther around 8 tonight to make an appointment for our interview next week. As with the week before, I found myself extremely nervous about calling but then realized I was allowing silliness to impede our mutual progress. When I did call, he greeted me with uninhibited enthusiasm and all of my reservations vanished in the sudden light of his pleasure.

He took the opportunity to thank me for the poem [“For the Love of the Poet” based on painting with same name] I left him and Sandra last week.

“Man,” he said, “that was really beautiful. I don’t know if Sandra told you or not, but the idea we came up with—because your words seem so spontaneous, from a gut level––was to do a book together. If you can do something that spontaneously for all the pictures in the book, that would be just great.”

I repeated my tired line about my genius not matching his.

“I don’t know about that. Like I said, the poem has a strong spontaneousness and it has that same multidimensional quality as the picture.”

“Well, it really is an extension of the portrait because when I saw it, the words started writing themselves. In fact, all of the pictures and sculpture inspired me so strongly that I just started composing poetry right then and there.” [At an exhibition of his work]

Could it be we were really having this conversation? How many times had I sat or walked or worked while imagining the possibility of the very thing we were now discussing. The first time I saw his work, it seemed the most natural thing in the world that I should compose a poetic commentary to match the images. What astonishes me more than anything else is that he seems to view my work the same way. How can that be?

Whereas in the recent past I’ve allowed myself to indulge in comparisons between my meeting Luther and great historical personalities meeting with the same, lately I’ve tried to refrain from doing that. But there seems to be in it some appropriateness independent of my own speculations. Shem Friedlander wrote of my two favorite Sufis that theirs “was a friendship based on the discovery of God through each other at a time when both beings had a lesson to impart to one another.” I think possibly it would have been more accurate to say that an overwhelming affirmation of God is what Shams and Rumi experienced through their friendship…

Luther has made a psychospiritual transition which I have, in a way, only casually reached for, while I as yet possess a sense of focus and drive (a bit weakened thought it may be) which seems to have atrophied within himself (quite understandably so give his spiritual disposition). Ours is, I believe, meant to be a true and good partnership. [end of excerpt]

Concluding and Beginning Anew

This post concludes with Carol Phelan Aebby’s poem, The Young Poet and the Painter, which is a rare kind of homage to my work with Luther written in the bibliographic profile acrostic form originated by Andre Emmanuel Bendavi ben-YEHU. The poet’s voice captures a lot of the mystery and wonder that many artists experience when striving to honor a difficult but ultimately rewarding task.

Aberjhani
© November 2016
Bright Skylark Literary Productions

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Painting Poems and Living History at the Jepson Center for the Arts

3/9/2016

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Title graphic with image of French artist Claude Monet's 1890 painting "Champ d'avoine" (Oat Field) in background at the Jepson Center for the Arts in Savannah, Georgia. (photograph by Aberjhani)

When the doors of the Jepson Center for the Arts opened to the public in Savannah, Georgia’s, downtown Historic District on March 10, 2006, it served as one more important reminder that the city is much more than a time-capsule filled with unique Civil War memorabilia. It is also home to many creative progressive thinkers eager to see a more sensible social and political balance than those presently evident.

This week marks the 10th anniversary of the most avant garde facility within the complex of the Telfair Arts Academy museums. The Center’s cultural and educational value to Savannah since its opening has been demonstrated many times over. It proved especially momentous to this author personally when the publication launch for ELEMENTAL, the Power of Illuminated Love (co-created with artist Luther E. Vann) sponsored by the Friends of African-American Arts, was held there May 29, 2008.

Sonic Revelations Painted Abstract Divine

The following year I returned to the center on March 22 with the intention of reporting on an exciting multi-media event taking place there. It featured a group of visual artists referred to as the Creative Force Artist Collective creating abstract paintings and sculpture while jazz saxophonist Jody Espina performed with a live band and audience members danced to the free-flowing vibes. The energy was so intense that I stopped jotting the notes I had been taking to write my story. Instead, my pen joined in with the flying paintbrushes, wailing music, and dancing souls by spontaneously writing the poem titled “Sounds Scribbled Mixed-Media Platinum at the Jepson Center 3/22/09.” The following is an excerpt:

A man sitting monkey-like
on the rooftop of his brain
calculating the precision
with which sunbeams
seduce moonlight
is only as spectacular maybe
as a river passably scatting
red-wine imitations of Louis or Ella.

But a man leaning un-harnessed
over the blue-diamond cliffs
of his jazz-baptized soul
as he weaves southern adagios
and spur-of-the-moment riffs
into new millennium bebop Mozart suites
makes for a different order of musical flora:
worthy of sonic revelations painted abstract divine.

––Aberjhani (excerpt from Sounds Scribbled Mixed-Media Platinum at the Jepson Center)

The complete poem was later published in The River of Winged Dreams. For me, the event that inspired it and the poem itself came to symbolize one of the ways that the Jepson Center for the Arts had come to exert a powerful regenerative influence on the city’s evolving cultural identity.

Claude Monet and Esteemed Company

Flashing forward to January 2016: I took a trip to the Telfair Museum of Art and Jepson Center for the Arts to conduct some field research for my current book-in-progress. The first surprise as I walked through Telfair Square toward the Telfair was discovering that it undergoing heavy-duty maintenance and repairs. The building was surrounded by scaffolding and the museum’s iconic trademark statues were sheathed in plastic. It would seem administrators wanted the senior museum at its best in time for the younger gallery’s birthday.

The Telfair Museum (as seen from Telfair Square in Savannah) undergoing repairs and maintenance in early 2016. (photograph by Aberjhani)

Inside the Jepson, I was fully prepared for the splendor that greeted me as I viewed the Monet and American Impressionism exhibit in the Steward Galleries. Given the combination of how French artist Claude Monet’s (1840-1926) singular brilliance had defined, and transcended, an entire era in art history so powerfully that its impact was celebrated in the Southeastern United States two centuries later, breathtaking splendor was about the only thing anyone could have expected. What I had not been prepared for were two different but equally-stunning exhibits in the form of photographs by Jack Leigh and the captivating oversized collage canvases of Mickalene Thomas.

The Evolution of
Photographer Jack Leigh

Readers of the book The American Poet Who Went Home Again know that I had the great honor calling John David "Jack" Leigh II (1942–2004) my friend. He was one of those to whom the book was dedicated and also the subject of the essay titled Bound Moments: Jack Leigh’s Beautiful Southern Adventures. To this day, I still find myself fascinated by the story of how he evolved from a disciplined athlete into an inspired photographer:

“…That was my secret life, my night life. My real life was playing football and being an all-American kid and doing things that fulfilled the image of a young southern boy. The art aspect remained a latent dream but it did guide me to where I was going.”

– (from The American Poet Who Went Home Again)

In truth, I had forgotten that he spent time documenting the construction of the Jepson and turned the labors of its creation into printed black and white art. Jack Leigh was a master at extracting beauty from the mundane and framing the ordinary within angles that revealed the extra-ordinary. His “Building the Jepson Series” of photographs were not in an exhibit room on the day I visited but lined along the hallway walls leading to and from the second-floor elevator, where they were sure to capture the attention of anyone walking that way.

It was fitting that I should have encountered Jack here because one of our last recorded interviews had been about The Land I’m Bound To (2000), a 25-year retrospective of his work at the Telfair commemorating W.W. Norton’s publication of his book of the same title.

Mickalene Thomas and the Art of Honoring Beauty

The inclusion of the Mickalene Thomas at Giverny exhibition across the hall, in the Levitt and Varnedoe Gallery, from the Monet paintings in the Steward Galleries deftly demonstrated art’s capacity to transcend boundaries and connect diverse human stories. It also highlighted the artist Mickalene Thomas’s passion for honoring beauty in classic and innovative settings with stringently-applied standards and techniques.

Mounted video of artist Mickalene Thomas, whose work was on display at the Jepson Center for the Arts in Savannah, Georgia, at the same time as French artist Claude Monet’s. (photo by Aberjhani)

Few might imagine that a 21st-century African-American woman artist would find as much inspiration and motivation as Thomas apparently did during her stay at the 19th-century French artist Monet’s famous home. But they would discover, eventually, that the discourse sustained through her visual and verbal meditations on the impact of Monet’s aesthetic standards is an important one elevating both discussions on contemporary art and (some would argue) the quality of it.

Thomas’s supersized canvases of reclining Black Women in juxtaposition to her studied interpretations of Monet’s home present beauty, tradition, and intellectual daring as self-defining aesthetics in and of themselves. To walk into a gallery and suddenly view Mickalene Thomas’s depictions of Black Women in particular is a psychologically jarring experience. For African Americans in particular, a chasm of divided awareness can crack open and you find yourself inside shaded regions simultaneously celebrating triumphant legacies of the past and mourning destructions of Black Life and Beauty in the present.

The Promise

With the range of creative talents that have been able to find expression and representation at the Jepson Center for the Arts since 2006, any and all tributes in honor of that fact are fully appropriate. And yet, more exciting than what the facility’s administrators, docents, patrons, and visitors have accomplished thus far is the promise of what may yet be accomplished in the years to come.

Aberjhani
© 3/9/2015
Bright Skylark Literary Productions

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Text and Meaning in Elemental, the Power of Illuminated Love (part 1 of 3)

12/17/2014

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"The greater puzzle of universal wisdom and beauty that we have strived to honor through our work includes the profound legacies of world artistic and spiritual traditions, the innate integrity of human communities where people seek to live in social harmony, and that regenerative stream of life sustained upon the earth itself as it spins through the cosmos to the music of the spheres."
--Luther E. Vann, from ELEMENTAL The Power of Illuminated Love

Success for the creatively-inclined individual can be defined in many ways. Certainly there are those who necessarily measure their triumphs in terms of monetary gains. There are others for whom success means the refinement of a process, participation in a unique endeavor, the achievement of a level of personal mastery, or the realization of a rare kind of vision.

For some, it is all of the above.

Upon agreeing to work with the artist Luther E. Vann on a book showcasing contemporary art, ekphrastic poems, and short essays in 1991, there was little reason to believe it would ever see publication much less gain recognition as a “success.” It was not the kind of work on which publishers preferred to take chances. Neither the artist nor this author at the time commanded such compelling presences in the marketplace as to make a victorious outcome likely or inevitable in 2008. Whether or not it would have moved the hearts of judges making and breaking aspiring entrepreneurs during Shark Tank Week is debatable.

Collage of ELEMENTAL The Power of Illuminated Love book cover with reviews by Aberjhani. Original book art by Luther E. Vann.

Nevertheless, the idea was powerful enough to survive almost 20 years before finally seeing the light of day. During that time, from 1991–2008, the individuals whose creative drive sustained the project experienced everything one might expect human beings to experience over a period of almost 2 decades: illness, divorce, death, economic upheavals, professional roadblocks, and professional victories.

A Persistent Vision

What allowed the endeavor to survive and eventually emerge in the form of a community-sponsored artistic event (in Savannah, Georgia), a celebrated book, and history-making art exhibition was a combination of artistic appeal and commercial potential. A number of poems from the book were published over several years, from the late 1990s to 9/11 and beyond, in ESSENCE Magazine. Likewise, some of the art in the proposed publication was at the time available for sale and made the idea of an accompanying exhibition attractive.

Gift book of art and ekphrastic poetry by Luther E. Vann and Aberjhani.

Moreover, both the artist and writer had strong connections to the traditions and creative talents of the Harlem Renaissance that endowed the work with a historical value which very few (if any) similar projects could claim. In addition, potential stakeholders were presented through a series of meetings conducted at the Jepson Center for the Arts with statements of the vision, objectives, and mission that made the work significant.

Stating the Mission

The goal and objective of ELEMENTAL, The Power of Illuminated Love, is to provide a creative tool capable of helping people recognize that the spiritual journey on which so many find themselves is not necessarily a solitary one. It underscores through text and image the idea that people inhabit and often share different states of being that make us much more alike than unalike.

The value of such a recognition can prove profound when considering the hundreds of thousands who commit suicide because of their belief that "nobody understands me," those who end up in prison due to an exaggerated sense of worthlessness, or those who live in dejected states of loneliness or despair brought on by unrelenting undiminished violent conflicts and conditions in the world. In certainly speaks in 2014 to the compulsion that drives individuals to join forces with such nihilistic entities as Boko Haram, ISIS, and the various hate groups that mar America’s social landscape.

NEXT: Text and Meaning in Elemental, the Power of Illuminated Love Part 2
AND: Text and Meaning in Elemental the Power of Illuminated Love Part 3

by Aberjhani

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The Birth of Elemental, the Power of Illuminated Love

Discussing the Possibility

Concluding and Beginning Anew

Painting Poems and Living History at the Jepson Center for the Arts

Sonic Revelations Painted Abstract Divine

Claude Monet and Esteemed Company

The Evolution of
Photographer Jack Leigh

Mickalene Thomas and the Art of Honoring Beauty

The Promise

Text and Meaning in Elemental, the Power of Illuminated Love (part 1 of 3)

Aberjhani

Archives

Categories

The Birth of Elemental, the Power of Illuminated Love

Discussing the Possibility

Concluding and Beginning Anew

Painting Poems and Living History at the Jepson Center for the Arts

Sonic Revelations Painted Abstract Divine​

Claude Monet and Esteemed Company​

The Evolution ofPhotographer Jack Leigh

Mickalene Thomas and the Art of Honoring Beauty ​

The Promise​

Text and Meaning in Elemental, the Power of Illuminated Love (part 1 of 3)

Aberjhani

Archives

Categories

Sonic Revelations Painted Abstract Divine

Claude Monet and Esteemed Company

The Evolution of
Photographer Jack Leigh

Mickalene Thomas and the Art of Honoring Beauty

The Promise