Visionary Vibes: A Blog by Aberjhani

Intensified Creative Vision Requires Maximized Creative Outlets (part 2 of 2)

5/19/2017

Part 2: "Intensified Creative Vision Requires Maximized Creative Outlets" essay and art by Aberjhani.

For the part 1 introduction to this blog on artwork which has recently become available please check it out right here. Part 2 begins right here right now:

Beauty of the World's Fountains

Fountains are among the most admired ornamental man-made structures because they combine the artistic beauty of refined sculpture with the precision of engineering and architecture. Celebrated examples can be found all over the world, including Savannah, Georgia. One of the city's most famous is the subject of two new Postered Chromatic Poetics images. Below is the accompanying text for the art and although I like both very much, I confess to being particularly pleased by the results achieved with Champagne Twilight:

Sepia Afternoon: Forsyth Park Fountain in Savannah, Georgia (USA)

A solitary figure stops in front the Forsyth Park Fountain to enjoy one of the city of Savannah's most popular and majestic attractions.

Ever since the days following the American Civil War, the fountain has been a favorite location for residents and visitors alike to take photographs. During the war, the park was known as the South Common military encampment where prisoners of war, a hospital, and poor house were maintained.

The fountain's spraying water is dyed green every year in celebration of St. Patrick's Day. In this image, late afternoon sunlight on a hot summer day creates an amber sepia haze that colors the air and water, slightly clarified and enhanced by digital filter.

Champagne Twilight: Forsyth Park Fountain in Savannah, Georgia (USA)

The elegantly-sculpted Forsyth Park Fountain, also referred to as the Versailles Fountain, dates back to the 1850s when model for it was derived from French-styled designs of the period. Along with the Confederate Monument, this is one of the primary centerpieces of Forsyth Park. The present-day fountain is the result of many renovations over the past century and a half, including a complete restoration in 1988.

A robed woman adorns the top of the fountain as water birds and tritons (or mermen) spout water below. In addition to benches that allow passersby to sit and enjoy the view, the fountain is surrounded by moss-covered oaks, palm trees, magnolias, and elms.

Prior to becoming known as Forsyth Park, the location during the Civil War was the South Common military encampment where POWS and a hospital were maintained.

Author-Artist

Aberjhani is an American poet, historian, essayist, editor, journalist, social critic, and cautious artist. His many honors include the Choice Academic Title of the Year Award, the Notable Book of the Year Award, Outstanding Journalist, and Poet of the Year. He is currently completing final edits on a work of creative nonfiction about the cultural arts, race relations, immigration, and human trafficking in his hometown of Savannah, Georgia.

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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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Giving Hope and Compassion a Chance in 2016

1/1/2016

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S14 Painting copyright by Tomas Alen Kopera with animation by George RedHawk

Astonished might be the best word to describe my response to the extraordinary gif featuring the reportedly blind Native American George RedHawk’s amazing animation of Polish artist Tomasz Alen Kopera’s 2014 oil on canvas titled “S14.” That it had been posted by the TedX Colombo chapter along with the following quote from The River of Winged Dreams doubled the intensity of my surprise:

Hearts rebuilt from hope resurrect dreams killed by hate.

“Hearts rebuilt from hope resurrect dreams killed by hate.” ― Aberjhani, The River of Winged Dreams http://t.co/wOyhpOTmZa
— TEDxColombo (@TEDxColombo) October 14, 2015

The image of the flame-breathing eagle (or possibly hawk?) atop the head of a man appeared to me like an angel of the more fiercely hybrid variety described in traditional texts of the King James Bible. I was struck by the parallel that the TedX Colombo group drew between it and the quote. And then the sense it made not only became very clear but reminded me of Emily Dickinson’s famous lines:

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all …”
( Emily Dickinson )

Hope in this New Year 2016, after the carnage and heartbreaks that have dogged humanity since 9/11, cannot make a difference in the form of nothing more than passive contemplation. It has to exercise strength in the manner described by Charter for Compassion as compassionate action. But before anything else can be employed to make a meaningful difference, hope itself has to remain intact within the hearts and souls of individuals.

The word hope (or a form of it) appears some 29 times in The River of Winged Dreams and 39 times in Journey through the Power of the Rainbow: Quotations from a Life Made Out of Poetry. On this first day of the year 2016 I find myself invoking the word not so much for myself––though there are many reasons I probably should––as for all those who may have reached a point where they feel there is no such thing as hope. Or if there is, that it is meaningless in the face of calamities currently overrunning humanity. Those who believe that to be the case are at liberty to give it meaning of significant applicable substance.

Consider, for example, the millions of refugees whose determination has gone beyond redefining their individual lives to changing the course of history itself. Think of the wrongly-imprisoned men and women whose faith saw them through years of agonizing injustice and whose examples of forgiveness inspire so many others. Witness those whose struggle to breathe the toxic air of outrageously polluted cities have turned their desperation into rallying cries for nations to take definitive action to correct the extreme destructiveness of climate change.

The Bridge of Silver Wings

The short excerpt below is from the introductory essay “Deliverance in Action” which was first published in The Bridge of Silver Wings poetry collection and later included as part of The River of Winged Dreams. It is shared at this time with the hope that humanity in 2016 can reverse the deadly trends of the past and create new life-sustaining legacies truly worth celebrating:

The truth is we do not always know how we go from falling off the edge of one cliff to running with determination beside the ledge of another. The Bridge of Silver Wings is what I’ve come to call the unknowable unquantifiable process of deliverance in action.

It is what saves a given soul when that soul no longer has any idea how to save itself. It may be described as Creator, divinity, the angelic, love, good fortune, dharma, grace, faith, or any number of ways that provide hints but no irrefutably definitive explanation. It arrives when there’s no logical reason to believe it shall and provides not only a sense of salvation but one of transformation. Whereas the conditions of a specific life may not undergo any kind of miraculous change, the manner in which a person perceives and addresses those issues do. With a revised awareness of what is required to bring balance, healing, hope, and prosperity back into one’s life, a person is often able to achieve exactly that.

The journey across The Bridge of Silver Wings can be extremely frightening. At the same time, it can be filled with the kind of joyful revelations and thrilling affirmations of one’s self and destiny that are experienced only when one dares to take it.
          (from The River of Winged Dreams)

Is the happiness that everyone wishes each other at the beginning of a New Year possible? It certainly would not seem to be for the millions around the world who find their very existence threatened by potential immediate deletion with every second that passes. The good news on this day and every day of the year is that those conditions do not have to remain the same.

Aberjhani
© New Year Day 2016
Bright Skylark Literary Productions

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The Haunting Splendor of Marie Uchytilová’s Memorial to the Children of Lidice

12/13/2015

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“If the idea of loving those whom you have been taught to recognize as your enemies is too overwhelming, consider more deeply the observation that we are all much more alike than we are unalike.” ©2015 quote and art by Aberjhani (from Splendid Literarium: A Treasury of Stories, Aphorisms, Poems, and Essays) Art inspired by original sculpture by Marie Uchytilováe

After learning about the amazing works of the late sculptor Marie Uchytilová (1924-1989), especially her masterpiece “The Memorial to the Children of Lidice," it became easy to see why a growing number of people are inspired by her. Yet she should be much better known and more celebrated than she is at this time.

Is the lack of recognition of her powerful creative contributions to humanity because of her gender, or due to her national origin of Czechoslovakia? Or might it be because humanity is still committing in so many different ways the atrocity she documented through her great historical work? Whatever the reason may be, the overwhelming evidence of the artist’s singular accomplishment speaks for itself. The minimal credit allotted her implies a case of guerrilla decontextualization by omission.

The “Memorial to the Children of Lidice” is also sometimes referred to as the “Memorial to Children Victims of War.” On days such as the United Nations’ Human Rights Day, or Day to End Racism, or World Peace Day, it can be difficult to think of such children. They’re the ones who never lived long enough to fight for their rights. They never got to present humanity with whatever unique gifts of creative vision, persuasive leadership, social influence, or scientific aptitude they may have possessed.

What can be most difficult, when thinking of them, is that we have made such little progress since the horrendous massacre (part of an act of retaliation ordered by Adolph Hitler) that occurred on June 10, 1942, in the Czech Republic village of Lidice, not so very far northwest of Prague. That massacre which “The Memorial to the Children of Lidice" documents so hauntingly.

Intensified Brilliance

One of the great miracles of those who sacrifice everything––as Marie Uchytilová did––for the sake of creating an enduring masterwork of consciousness-raising art is that their voices always manage to reach hearts eager to hear what they have to say. What Uchytilová’s voice had to say to this author’s heart inspired the creation of the quotation artwork posted with this essay.

Someone might very well rummage through hidden details of her life and come up with reasons to challenge my assertion that the gifted sculptress deserves greater acknowledgement than has been granted. I would, then, still have to contend that while one might choose to dismiss her, it is hardly possible to imagine ignoring the intensified brilliance of the souls of 82 children emanating from the bronze splendor of her tribute to them.

Aberjhani
© Human Rights Day 2015
Bright Skylark Literary Productions

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Calligraphy of Intimacy: World Poetry Day 2014

3/20/2014

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One need not, after all, call oneself an artist in order to embrace either the beauty that roses give to the world or the genius that one’s love does. (Aberjhani)

I. ENCOUNTER WITH BEAUTY

When viewing a recent untitled painting by Dublin artist Jaanika Talts a strange thought came to me. It was this: Between the elegant reach of an artist’s color-stained fingers toward her canvas and the haunted explosion of a soldier’s bullet inside his brother’s chest, somewhere a terrified soul is seeking shelter inside the warmth of a stranger’s voice, or an infant is squealing at the incomprehensible delight of discovering it is alive.

As I said, it was a strange thought.

Talts’ painting depicts a cluster of multi-colored roses in different stages of blossoming, nestled against the flesh of dark green leaves and framed by deep brooding shades of emerald, bronze, gold, ruby, and amethyst. There is no description (please see comments below) of the medium but it appears to be mixed acrylic and might include photography as well as an actual rose or two.

The painting caught my attention only partly because it was accompanied by this quote: “Beauty will snatch us by the heart and love us until we are raw with understanding.” The words come from the poem “Calligraphy of Intimacy,” first published in 1996 in a small press magazine called Out of the Blue and later in the book I Made My Boy Out of Poetry. But the image drew my gaze mostly because it was something new from Ms. Talts and then because of what struck me as a sustained tension between persistent beauty and grace asserting itself while under fire.

II. THE POEM

The poem “Calligraphy of Intimacy” is about how relationships anchored in mutual need and affection sometimes turn unexpectedly into battlefields. The relationship might be between two people or two nations, two dreams or two cultures. At their core, they are defined by a gravitational pull toward the best within each other but superficial externals repeatedly block or sever their connection. That could, in many ways, describe the international community’s centuries-year-old waltz with peace and non-peace, and it consequently makes this poem a good one to share for World Poetry Day (March 21) and National Poetry Month (April) 2014:

Calligraphy of Intimacy

Perhaps one day our togetherness
will resemble the calligraphic design
of the letters that spell Abd Al-Jami,
a name denoting beauty: both inside and out.

Like the Arabic character alif
curving its loveliness towards
the end of a numinous breath
you will wander towards an unseen mountain,
re-emerging into life by way of bazaars
in Morocco. Or cafes in Paris.
While I nurse sand dunes and canyons,
shaking with the delicious certainty
that your wanderings and mine
will soon converge, and lock, in the hair
and screaming of the same urgent fire.

Like the seductive lines and silences
of Islamic calligraphy we will bow
and clash three thousand swords.
Or disappear between the warm shadows
of hands, whispers and kissing
disguised and protected by the shields of art.

Out of the canvas of our passion confusion
will rise up, blinding those too curious
about who we are. Or what we do.
Beauty will snatch us by the heart
and love us until we are raw with understanding.
Like two well-paid royal scribes we will let our
hands explain each other to each other and learn
at last to comprehend this calligraphy called intimacy.

            (from I Made My Boy Out of Poetry by Aberjhani)

III. STARTLING SPLENDOR

Some may recall that when writing about Talts’ art in Sensualized Transcendence, I described her two dominant styles as emergent expressionism and transformative impressionism :

If emergent expressionism lends chromatic form and substance to in-between states of metamorphosis, then transformative impressionism may be described as endowing such stages of transition with metaphorical narrative. (from Sensualized Transcendence: Editorial and Poem on the Art of Jaanika Talts)

Those qualities, along with the artist’s penchant for juxtapositions of unpredictable colors, remain evident in the new canvas. At first glance, the flowers almost appear to be trapped in a net of barely-visible anguish. Then take a second look and they could be resting inside a cosmic field of painted ecstasy, quietly breathing in the profound joys and smoldering sorrows that give them their startling splendor.

As over-the-top as the above statement might sound to certain ears, it is no more so than the events and circumstances that have come to shade the character of the year 2014 thus far. On the day that I became aware of the painting, the mystery of Malaysia’s Flight MH370 had just grown considerably deeper, Russia’s military presence in Crimea had become more unsettling, and the Syrian landscape continued to overflow with blood as the region headed into the fourth year of its civil war.

In fact, the previously-noted concepts of persistent beauty and grace asserting itself while under fire could serve as apt descriptions of how Earth continues to spin and dance through the cosmos while humanity carries on with struggles to give a living functional meaning to the word Love.

At any moment within any hour or day or week or year, we are positioned between opportunities to affirm beauty and wonder in the world, and opportunities to assist in humanity’s needless destruction. Some might argue that the latter is not an opportunity at all but an unfortunate faith in self-annihilation and a dangerously macabre addiction to toxic nightmares. One need not, after all, call oneself an artist in order to embrace either the beauty that roses give to the world or the genius that one’s love does. You only need to allow it, and yourself, the respect and chance they deserve.

by Aberjhani
World Poetry Day 2014

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Intensified Creative Vision Requires Maximized Creative Outlets (part 2 of 2)

Beauty of the World's Fountains

Sepia Afternoon: Forsyth Park Fountain in Savannah, Georgia (USA)

Champagne Twilight: Forsyth Park Fountain in Savannah, Georgia (USA)

Author-Artist

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

Giving Hope and Compassion a Chance in 2016

The Bridge of Silver Wings

The Haunting Splendor of Marie Uchytilová’s Memorial to the Children of Lidice

Intensified Brilliance

Calligraphy of Intimacy: World Poetry Day 2014

Aberjhani

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Categories

Intensified Creative Vision Requires Maximized Creative Outlets (part 2 of 2)

Beauty of the World's Fountains

Sepia Afternoon: Forsyth Park Fountain in Savannah, Georgia (USA)

Champagne Twilight: Forsyth Park Fountain in Savannah, Georgia (USA)

Author-Artist

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​

Giving Hope and Compassion a Chance in 2016

The Bridge of Silver Wings

The Haunting Splendor of Marie Uchytilová’s Memorial to the Children of Lidice

Intensified Brilliance

Calligraphy of Intimacy: World Poetry Day 2014

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