The Art of Poetry - Poetry of Art : Reading

John will focus on how poetry and the visual arts inform each other and how art enriches the everyday. He will be reading poetry about art, including his poems on Dutch and Flemish masters and contemporary Australian artists, and poems that speak of the impetus to create art, even while glued to the Pacific Highway.

John is a widely published poet who has won major Australian poetry competitions (the Newcastle and the David Tribe). He holds a PhD in poetics and collaborates with musicians and artists. He has performed here and overseas, at festivals and various venues including art galleries: the Art Gallery of NSW, Brett Whiteley Studio and Newcastle and Hazelhurst Regional Art Galleries, and First Draft.

This is John’s first public reading since moving to the Mid North Coast from inner Sydney two years ago and becoming Artistic Director of the Bellingen Readers & Writers Festival.

John with a Deb Mostert painting

Extract

De Hooch was painting light interiors by 1655 prior to and influencing Vermeer. He may have used a camera obscura like Vermeer. He celebrated Euclidean space, stuck a pin with string attached to the vanishing point, usually off centre, I have seen the holes in his canvases. Perpendicular lines converge on a narrow angle of view for easygoing realism.

Perspective was gradually developed, which we take for granted as natural, as reducing the world to human proportions and gives us access to objective nature.[i]

Children in a Doorway with ‘Colf’ Sticks c1660

An unusually tight composition is focused on two children,

the closest stretching to the latch of the open door,

its planks scratched across the grain.

She’s painted with the noise of kids, tousled red hair

back lit by the winter sky, happy enough to almost sing.

Her friend waits with the ball beyond the back door

top half swung against the wall, dark, indeterminate

the bottom, half open, slices light between the hinges.

It’s one of the clearest views of a house he ever painted.

The Delft tiles on the wall have two figures, acrobats playing on each

blue, and a couple of the terracotta floor tiles crack at the beginning

of the picture, a history of wear on these fulcrums ricocheting light

across the skin of the world. A fault line of narrow tiles runs beneath

the lintel, see what’s under our noses, in the wrinkles of a day.

The floor’s paved with multiples of local tiles, glazed by light pooling from each precious pane; shadows softly remind you of multiple light sources and open doorways. The rooms are not yet specialised into bedroom, living room, study - though the division of labour is gearing up fast. The invention of domesticity is a middle class discovery made in the Golden Age of Batavian high capital adventure. Homes absorb capital inflow, (the Dutch Empire was the richest in Europe cornering the grain market among others). Home comforted owners for being under the sea, or being surrounded by enemies, or may have eased anxiety from inflationary knowledge and technology, about how wild and large the planet seems to be out there beneath the stars.

This was all happening as Joan Blaue, in the world’s largest printing house in Amsterdam, is preparing the Grand Atlas, 600 beautiful hand-coloured inaccurate maps drifting wind roses and rhumb lines towards a distant hesitant scribble, the liminal margin of Australia.

[i] It is a myth that Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446) invented the technique and and demonstrated to his fellow Florentines in two dramatic peep-shows between 1405 and 1425."Perspective, in transforming the ousia (reality) into the phainomenon (appearance), seems to reduce the divine to a mere subject matter for human consciousness; but for that reason, conversely, it expands human consciousness into a vessel for the divine" (Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, tr. Christopher Wood (New York, 1991, p72).