EKPHRASIS means to point out, describe, explain, illuminate, even; to increase our understanding of, a work of art. Originally, it was a literary term stemming back to the ancient world when they described & wrote poems about the extraordinary works of art that surrounded them. So, it’s one art-form describing, explaining, illuminating another. In this way, a painting may represent a sculpture, and vice versa; a picture may describe a poem; a sculpture depict a heroine of a novel; in fact, given the right circumstances, any art may describe any other art in a way which tries to explain the sentiments of the artist when she/he created her/his work.
SCUPLTURE PAINTING Sir Antony Caro’s sculpture is called Sea Music, which gives us a clue as to its meaning. You could say Marisa’s painting explains the fluidity & musicality of Caro’s Sea Music ----- in a completely different art form. So here sculpture becomes painting & in doing so the painting illuminates our understanding of the original. Note the use of distortion with software. The results can be interesting & even enhance the idea.
SCULPTURE DRAWING Boy with Thorn, also known as Spinario, is a Greco-Roman Hellenistic bronze sculpture. Rubens made his own drawings describing this very complicated pose, using a more muscular model, rather than drawing from the statue itself, thus bringing his own interpretation to, & understanding of, the piece.
SCULPTURE PAINTING Imagine Cezanne scrutinising this figurine & considering its chubby characteristics. This is what he explains to us in his painting. You could say this is a painting of the figurine – or you could say he’s painting an idea of the figurine – & that idea is to do with curves & spheres & apple-like forms. So, the three dimensional figurine becomes a painting & in doing so Cezanne increases our understanding of that figurine. The straight lines of the drawing-board behind frame the torso & by contrast enhance the figure’s shapeliness.
SCULPTURE & ARTEFACTS PAINTING In Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon 1907, note the angular faces of the women on the right. Like many modernists of the early 20th Century, Picasso recognised the artistic value of the contents of the ethnographic museums; a very new attitude at the time. He collected numerous African tribal masks & Polynesian sculptures. These tribal masks gave him a new language with which to explain the human form: in this case, to render, in this case, a savage, aggressive vision of the female. ‘Les Demoiselles’ depicts a Barcelona bordello. These African artefacts helped him develop a whole new movement of bold, invented, fragmented forms. Thenceforth, he abandoned the single view-point and, of course, invented Cubism. Les Demoiselles points out, illuminates, if you like, the power inherent in so- called ‘primitive’ art.
SCULPTURE PAINTING Ancient Roman & Greek sculptures would use draped fabric, or neatly dressed hair to lead the eye round the figure; a sculptural device. Similarly, the painter Euan Uglow relies heavily on drawing to establish the illusion of a 3 dimensional solid by plotting points round that neatly dressed hair. The points are positions that lead us through space. The subtlety of the colour judgements in the shadows, the facets on the stone, again help to establish the illusion of the 3rd dimension.
PAINTING SCULPTURE: Liberty leading the People is a famous painting by the Romantic artist Eugene Delacroix. This painting inspired Bartholdi's Statue of Liberty. This is a statuesque, stately idea of Liberty, this time holding a torch aloft instead of the tricolour. Although she adopts a more stable, immovable stance than that of Liberty in the Delacroix painting, they are both powerful national symbols in their own way. The coin is the reverse side of a dollar coin, of course, a low sculptural relief of Liberty. Turning the statue of Liberty back into a painting has been done many times in many ways, here is one example in a pointillistic style (American artist Perry Milou) - which may or may not bring out the power of this emblem.
PAINTING SCULPTURE When the words ‘Modigliani’ and ‘ekphrasis’ were entered into a search engine we got sculptural interpretations of the paintings which seemed mere parodies of the original, being far too insensitive. They did not represent/explain the sentiments of the original. Then we looked at two Modigliani portraits, one painted and one sculpted, and we noted that Modigliani’s portraits were elegant - the product of observation combined with invention and expressive too. With ekphrasis, we are hoping to retain those qualities to avoid parodying the original. Try not to make ordinary something which is extraordinary.
PAINTING TO SCULPTURE We looked at Caro’s interpretation of Rubens painting Decent from the Cross…is it the awkwardness of the delicate task in hand? It is a painting rendered as a sculpture, anyway.
PAINTING SCULPTURE Picasso, Violin & Bottle on a table 1915, was shown because it seemed to comprise fragments of shapes from a still life painting but rendered in wood. We could imagine Anita or Liz doing something like this as a three dimensional ekphrastic response to a painting.
MUSIC PAINTING Broadway Boogie Woogie, Piet Mondrian 1943 is a painting inspired by American jazz, particularly boogie-woogie with its syncopated beat. Also its improvisational aesthetic was in keeping with his approach to painting. In the words of moma: the blinking blocks of color creating a vital and pulsing rhythm, an optical vibration that jumps from intersection to intersection like the streets of New York. At the same time, the picture is carefully calibrated …..an extraordinary balancing act.” And of course going the other way – there has been plenty of architecture inspired by Mondrian …and fashion too, which Liz testifies too!
MUSIC PAINTING The music of Bach and Mozart has inspired some of the most progressive art of our time, and artists like Paul Klee devoted their lives to translating this universal music into the language of visual art. Such is the case with The Bavarian Don Giovanni, in which Klee indicated his admiration for the Mozart opera as well as for certain contemporary sopranos, while hinting at his own amorous pursuits. The five women’s names, an allusion to the operatic scene in which Don Giovanni’s servant Leporello recites a list of his master’s 2,065 conquests; are singers and models with whom Klee had fleeting romances. If our work can illuminate the music - that’s Ekphrasis!
MUSIC PAINTING Kandinsky, another Bauhaus artist, cannot be omitted in this context, as his theories on colour associated tone with timbre, hue with pitch, & saturation with volume of sound. He also developed a theory of geometric figures and their relationships.
MUSIC PAINTING Georgia O'Keefe’s fluttering forms made us refer back to Kandinsky - he saw light blue as the equal of the sounds of a flute, dark blue means cello and an even darker blue would be an organ. Maybe that’s what she was doing here. So if music is your subject piece, we suggest - try and avoid simply arm-waving mindlessly to the music! Listen several times over & think about the mood the composer intended, using colour, line and shape.
MUSIC PAINTING Song without Words by Frederic Leighton is a more representational way of interpreting music, here inspired by Mendelssohn. Music and sound are shown through the blackbird at the top of the picture depicted in full song, and the two fountains which would add their own distinctive noises. Also consider the tonal harmony of the colours used, the gold and brown that figure most predominantly are set off in the black skirt, the blackbird, the black amphora of the fountain, whilst the red pot and the girl's red underskirt offer other accents.
MUSIC SCULPTURE Paul Fletcher’s Angels for Bath Abbey are machetes rather than the finished pieces in which he’s describing the sounds of the instruments. “As a sculptor I was interested to discover if I was capable of translating the sounds of particular instruments into form. For this I used the conventional wing forms attenuating, stunting, twisting, sharpening and softening, trying to achieve the strange and individual sounds made by strings, trumpet, etc
BALLET PAINTING & COLLAGE Picasso's Three Musicians: (Oil and Collage) Picasso designed the costumes and stage set for the Ballet Pulcinella using traditional actors but placed within a cubist design. This work draws on the same characters of Pulcinella, Harlequin and a monk that he'd been working on for the ballet.
ARCHITECTURE PAINTING Representing architecture in two dimensions (flat) is an obvious example of one art form describing another. For ekphrasis we are asking you to look for those features that determine the essence and character of a building rather than a fastidious likeness. This painting of Ca’d’Oro by John Piper is on show in Southampton City Art Gallery. (There's a whole slideshow of examples of John Piper's work on the BBC Your Paintings website, researching this made me fall in love with his work all over again). ARCHITECTURE PAINTING Where the inspiration is contemporary architecture it might be appropriate to use hard edges and hard edged reflections as Ben Johnson’s triptych. Contrast Monet’s Rouen Cathedral, soft & melting in the light & colour. It also talks of the elegance & rhythm of the aging façade. There are countless examples of paintings inspired by architecture we could have used…. from Canaletto to Carel Weight. I included this handsome painting by Charlotte Sorapure, (contemporary artist living in Bath) because of the lively way she handles paint & colour. It’s called The Roost, but it is a 3-d illusion of a baroque archway in Toledo.
POETRY PAINTING The Pre-Raphaelites provided a rich seam of paintings from poetry of which you can find many examples. A very famous piece is The Lady of Shallot, a poem by Tennyson interpreted here by JW Waterhouse – he certainly brought out the lines: And down the river’s dim expanse Like some bold seer in a trance, Seeing all his own mischance – With glassy countenance Did she look to Camelot.
POETRY PAINTING This is Dante Gabriel Rosetti's interpretation of The Lady of Shallot using a wood engraving to illustrate an edition of the poem. the rather simple way he has illustrated the lady compared with the detail given to the Knight is attributed to his interest in representing (and I'm quoting here} “the virtuous knight who interacts spiritually with the physically unattainable woman”.
POETRY PAINTING Isabella and The Pot of Basil was a narrative poem by John Keats illustrated here by William Holman Hunt....a long story involving Isabella's lover being murdered by her brother and she buried his head in a pot of basil: “She wrapp’d it up; and for its tomb did choose A garden-pot, wherein she laid it by, And cover’d it with mould, and o’er it set Sweet Basil, which her tears kept ever wet.” POETRY PAINTING A different style and perhaps more ekphrastic as it is not directly representational is this painting “Figure 5 in Gold” by American artist Charles Demuth “The Great Figure” which uses imagery from Williams’s poem "The Great Figure," which evokes the sights and sounds of a fire engine speeding down the street. The intersecting lines, repeated "5," round forms of the numbers, lights, street lamp, and blaring sirens of the red fire engine together infuse the painting with a vibrant, urban energy.
Among the rain and lights I saw the figure 5 in gold on a red firetruck moving tense unheeded to gong clangs siren howls and wheels rumbling through the dark city
POETRY SCULPTURE Rodin's The Kiss...just a brief mention that this well-known work was inspired by the characters from Dante's Inferno...a passionate, but not as it turns out, a particularly happy story!
Summing up: Why Ekphrasis? This is the magic of ekphrasis: a work of art that describes or conveys within itself another work of art is giving us a kind of tripled richness of meaning. First, there’s the work of art being described, carrying with it all its own stories; secondly, the way it is conveyed by the ekphrastic work – that we might not have seen for ourselves. And finally there’s the ekphrastic work itself, which is a work of art in its own right. Where we might otherwise turn away, or shrug, or feel we don’t ‘get’ it, we’re drawn in by the ekphrastic artist’s enthusiasm and longing to share their experience of someone else’s work.
That is to say, that the thing about ekphrasis is that it’s really good at reminding us why we should care about art. Ekphrastic works give us new ways of seeing (or hearing, or feeling) a work of art we may have not known about, or cared about, or noticed. One of the strongest creative impulses for an artist from any discipline is to take an idea from one medium and then push it into another. There is a unique opportunity to explore what happens in the transformation.
Dorset Art Weeks handing in date: 25th May Members are asked to: Select an existing piece of art & translate it into a completely different dimension. Not just medium - dimension. So a sculpture becomes a painting, or a painting becomes a sculpture; equally other art-forms like music, poetry, pottery, or architecture can provide the subject piece which is transformed into either a painting or sculpture. We are calling it ‘Ekphrasis’, as this means to 'point out' or 'explain' an artwork - in another art-form.
1) Study your subject piece closely, and explain it - in its new form. Ideally, be true to the spirit & the essence of the original piece.
2) It might help to think of the elements common to all these art-forms. – rhythm, structure, colour, tone, line, shape, pattern. We talk of a painting’s ‘pictorial architecture’; we see a close positioning of verticals in a picture and speak of staccato; we organise our colour scheme referring to its key.
3) To be clear, an oil painting becoming a watercolour is too close a transition. We’re looking for a more dramatic shift in the art-form, e.g. flat to solid.
4) We can accept up to two x 2-dimensional (i.e. flat) pieces of artwork of up to one meter, plus two sculptures.
5) For the exhibition we will be asking you to please supply a postcard size image of your subject piece (that is, the artwork that inspired you) and another postcard with a sentence describing your intention. Those inspired by music or poetry may wish to supply a QR code.
6) Enjoy!