I'd love to get some honest feedback from you folks! Here's the story:

A friend of mine called me the other night at 1:30 am, in panic. She's a painter and needed an small text to describe one of her paintings, for a contest she was applying to. She wanted me to write it for her and needed it for the next morning.

I asked her three words describing her painting, a .jpg image of it, and got back to her a few minutes later with something she didn't ask: a poem inspired by her painting and something else...

The painting is called AAtsu, which means "I don't know" in Inuktikut. It seems that her experience in the Great Canadian North led her to meet with people who had no certitudes, and who were always answering all questions by "I don't know". Here's the painting:

http://www.tektonik.com/download/trou.jpg

And here's what I wrote:

-------------
An airy-fairy mansion lies there in odium, repining from the insolence of a horizon preying the soil of its surroundings, ostracized yet resisting, wroth and clinged to the mud, as if she knew that no other piece of ground would accept her skookum claws. The calvity of the landscape seems to contrast with her crinite belly, yet one may think that she sterilized it by her insisting desperation. That semi-whole withers in a sea of snow while no movement is seen, no soul is heard, nothing except a mere whisper of lassitude.
------------

Did you figure out what was my other inspiration? Any feedback on the text itself? She loved it dearly, and asked me to do the same for every single one of her paintings. But she is not a perfect judge and neither am I, and I wouldn't want to write stuff for her that would hurt her work. That's why I'm asking for honest feedback from this great forum!

Cheers,
Melkiades

Welcome aBoard, Mel.
Here's a clickable link for you
http://www.tektonik.com/download/trou.jpg

Thank you Consuelo. I fixed my original post too.

cheers
melkiades

huh. skookum. either Lewis Carroll or Pogo.

or not.

melkiades: Your "other inspiration" is obviously Anu's AWADs including "crinite", "calvity" and "wroth" in December 04, and "airy-fairy", "odium" and "repine" in January 05. Your tone fits the mood of the painting. The artist herself is the best judge of that, and "she dearly loves it". But she asked for a "small text" and her painting is spare while your description is not. Do you think there is a danger that the judges of this art contest will judge the painting more on the basis of your text than her art? If your art surpasses hers, or hers yours, either way her art is the poorer for it. Your artist friend presumably supplied you with the 3 words you asked for. Why not use those 3 words as your text instead? At least they belong to the artist.

hi Plutarch,

You got it, I got those words from Anu's AWAD.

Yes, she did ask for a text, but in her mind, it was something that actually described the painting, some sort of introduction to it. I suggested to forget about the idea and that instead, an artistic text rather than a bureaucratic one, should be presented. Art inspiring art, why not?

You could describe her painting in other ways than "spare". It's abstract art, and in that sense, one could say that the work has a hidden code, something that the artist alone understands. That's what abstract art is to me. And it's also why I decided to use less common words - because they are a sort of code, just like the painting.

Yes, there is that danger, and that's why I wanted her to sign the text, and not put my name on it. That way, it would be judged solely on her overal aptitudes. But then again, why not simply see this as an experiment in creation, where two individuals "use" each other's work to create something new. No one has to know which of the two, the text or the painting, was created first. Isn't this the exact same case when a musical score is written for cinema? Still, we don't judge a movie on the basis of its musical score, and vice-versa.

I asked her those 3 words - I needed an inspiration, a hint as to what she meant by her painting - and I interpreted the rest by writing what's there.

One last idea when I did this was to inspire myself on someone else's work - Anu's. This is to add a level to the concept of someone's work inspiring someone else's and so on and so forth...in this case, we have 3 levels: painter-writer-Anu's "encyclopedia". Checkout how Lautréamont, the father of surrealism in literature, created his great book (Les chants de Maldoror) - by copying entire sections of an encyclopedia on animals. I just added one more level here by citing him :))

Thank you for your input, it does open to some new ideas!
cheers
melkiades

Immediately to my mind: Ice Fishing Hole.

k