Tag: Art

Paperworks…Matthew Broussard

Who would recognize this as a Drafting tool –
Manual CAD 1940
pencil on laid manuscript paper
(25 cm x 37 cm / 10″ x 14.5″)
I enjoy the Morandi-like play of shadows and surfaces
in this survey of my kitchen table.
Pencil on laid manuscript paper.
(25 cm x 37 cm / 10″ x 14.5″)

 Paperworks: Estimates and Perspectives

My husband, Matthew Broussard, has been working on a series of drawings, a survey of our house. The paper he is using is from an old book (c. 1846) regarding how to correctly survey land and estimate its value. The book is from the era when Lombardy was still occupied by Austria. The Italian Revolutions of 1848 were still brewing and Garibaldi would not take part in the famous but brief Roman Revolution for another 3 years. Lombardy would not become part of independent Italy until 1859. Within the book there are annotations on supplemental pages, lined like notebook paper (but larger) and written in a calligraphic longhand, that describe amendments made to the surveying and assessment rules in following years. It is on these pages, turned upside down, that Matthew has begun a survey of the iconic yet intensely human images of our territory.
Dish rack over the sink – a prosaic object rendered poetic with close observation:
the tools of our daily life offer a survey map of how we inhabit our own territory.
Pencil on laid manuscript paper (25 cm x 37 cm / 10″ x 14.5″)

IPM 2013 : You Are Here

International Poetry Month 2013

INTERNATIONAL POETRY MONTH 2013 IS NOW OPEN FOR SUBMISSIONS from now until 15 Feburary 2013. KEEP READING BELOW FOR THIS YEAR’S THEME AND HOW TO SUBMIT:

Vedi sotto per le linee guida per la presentazione in italiano (tutto in verde)

Voir ci-dessous pour les directives de soumission en français (toute en blu)

The theme  for IPM 2013 will be Cultural Atlas:

How has your culture shaped your internal map? How does where you’re from affect how you see where and/or who you are? Which cultural points of connection/reference can be discovered in your poetry, even if obliquely?

Send submissions in any language (no more than 3 poems of any length) to:

bmcclellan.lapoeta@gmail.com

You will receive a receipt confirmation and a response within one week of your submission.

Poems will be published during February of 2012. For poems in other languages an English translation is welcome but not obligatory.

ITALIANO

INTERNAZIONALE MESE DELLA POESIA  2013 è ora aperto per contributi provenienti da ora fino al 15 febbraio 2013. Continua a leggere sotto per il tema di quest’anno e come inviare la vostra poesia:

Il tema di IPM 2013 sarà Atlante Culturale:

In che modo ha la tua cultura plasmato la tua mappa interna? Come le tue radici culturali o il tuo paese influenzano il modo di vedere dove e/o chi sei? Quali sono i punti culturali di collegamento / di riferimento può scoprire nella tua poesia, anche se obliquamente?

Inviare la poesia proposta (non più di 3 opere di qualsiasi lunghezza) al redazione a:

bmcclellan.lapoeta@gmail.com

Riceverete una conferma di ricevuto e una risposta entro una settimana dalla vostra presentazione.

Le opere saranno pubblicate nel mese di febbraio (2013) come l’anno scorso, ma voglio avere la poesia in gennaio se possibile (in qualsiasi lingua – traduzione in inglese gradito ma non obbligatorio).

FRANÇAIS

INTERNATIONAL Mois de la poésie 2013 est maintenant ouvert pour les soumissions à partir de maintenant jusqu’au 15 Février 2013. Continuer la lecture ci-dessous pour le thème de cette année et la façon de présenter votre poème:

Le thème de l’IPM 2012 sera l’Atlas Culturel:

Comment votre culture façonnée votre carte interne? Comment ça d’où vous venez affecter la façon dont vous voyez où et / ou qui vous êtes? Quels sont les points culturels de connexion / de référence peut être découvert dans votre poésie, même si obliquement?

Envoyer une proposition de poésie (pas plus de 3 œuvres de n’importe quelle longueur) à la rédaction:

bmcclellan.lapoeta @ gmail.com

Vous recevrez une confirmation et reçu une réponse dans une semaine après votre présentation.

Les œuvres seront publiés en Février (2013) que l’année dernière,
mais je veux avoir la poésie en Janvier si possible (dans n’importe quelle langue – traduction anglaise bienvenue mais pas obligatoire).

Cultural Atlas of a Displaced Life: El Pescador / Fingerprint:Ring

Cultural Atlas of a Displaced Life: Il Pescador / Fingerprint:Ring
El Pescador/Fingerprint: Ring – a multimedia collage from “Cultural Atlas of a Displaced Life: Embroidered Errors.”

This will make more sense if you take a look at the previous pages of the Cultural Atlas of a Displaced Life: Embellished Errors

The title El Pescador is from the Mexican lotteria card (that somehow emigrated from Texas to Italy tucked between the pages of a book) included in the mixed media collage on the left hand page. Behind it is another hand print in marble dust on tissue painted round with lampblack. The hand print reaches towards a neon-pink sticker with my mother’s handwriting, towards an unreachable past from a composite future represented by El Pescador – the fisherman – who must always be anchored within in order not to be lost. Ironically, although the image is taken from my Texas cultural roots, the landscape on the card looks surprisingly like that of Lago Maggiore with the Alps in the background, a landscape I’ve addressed in two poems: Monte Rosa or the Picturesque and the Sublime, and Lombard Spring / Rondeau á Lago Maggiore.

The left hand page is connected to the right by a coat of white paint that covers (on the center left) an image of a person who has just opened a box (Pandora’s?), and is holding instructions for what to do with the contents but looks doubtful – again from IKEA. Living in a different cultural context with a different language and only the cultural map from my ‘mother-culture’ to navigate by was a bewildering sensation that I explored in Testimonio.

I found myself searching for constants, strangely comforted by being near the Mediterranean sea whose waters – in some slow, circumnavigation through white clouds and shifting currents – must have once broken on the sands of the Gulf of Mexico. Fingerprint:Ring expresses that unity through another universal language: hardware (no, not the computer kind). A pencil drawing of a hose clamp, comfortingly the same in any country, neither metric nor standard, adjustable with a flat-head screwdriver, a slender coin, or the tip of a butter knife. At the top left of the page, my pale, smeary fingerprint, an intentional error, both unique and universal.

Cultural Atlas of a Displaced Life: Embellished Errors

I’ve been working on some pages for the “Sketchbook Project 2013” that are a visual way of digesting my experience as an emigrant from Texas to Italy. Click on the links in the captions below each image to read the essay/story that goes with it and find links connecting the images with poetry.

Cover
Cultural Atlas of a Displaced Life: Embellished Errors – (Pax Texana)
Pax Texana (detail)
Cultural Atlas of a Displaced Life: El Pescador / Fingerprint:Ring

A whole new page…

Anyone familiar with this blog knows that I work alongside my husband, contemporary artist and furniture designer Matthew Broussard, both as a partner in building bespoke furniture and as a studio assistant for his artistic projects. I sand, gild, apply fine finishes and, the best part: spend lots of time talking about painting compositions, production methods and how to get from concept to completed project. You’re welcome to take a look at our latest projects on the newest page that we’ve made HERE.

Matthew working on his latest commission “Citta del Sole”

 He writes: 

City of the Sun – a painting

by Matthew Broussard on Sunday, July 8, 2012 at 2:02pm ·

City of the Sun

This painting takes its name from Tommaso Campanella’s book, written in the sixteenth century, in which Campanella describes an ideal city, an ordered, just, and poetic society.

The image is of a piazza that was built by my daughter with wooden building blocks on the floor of our room. I was struck by this act of ‘tracing’ a city both conceptually (she explained in minute detail the reason behind the placement of each block) and as it is realized, even in the adult world. From philosophers to urbanistic experts and the ordinary city-dweller who lives in the midst of it, everyone has their own concept of what the city should or could be.

Cultural Atlas of a Displaced Life: Embellished Errors – (Pax Texana)

Pax Texana - copyright 2012 Bonnie McClellan all rights reserved

The inside cover of my Cultural Atlas is covered with Italian shelf-paper. I used it because when I tore up the front cover, I thought that the inside should be stabilized (another embellished error). This paper is still made in this country; a lovely, heavy, egg-cream ground with black, red, dark blue, or green patterns. When I had first moved to Italy, I lived in a rural valley outside Florence; I was trading work for a place to stay with an American-Italian couple. One of the first things Adele asked me to do was strip off the old paper from her kitchen shelves and re-cover them with new paper. It marked one of my first trips into the treasure-palace that is the Italian ‘whatnot’ store. While I was living there I was in the process of a separation that turned into a divorce and a cultural shift that involved re-evaluating the (then) 38 years of my life in Texas.

The poetry/story of this can be found in my Orphan Poetry series; however, later, I also made, from the empty tissue paper ‘books’ that remain after one has used up the thin sheets of gold leaf, a series of impressions of my left hand made with white marble-dust and gum arabic. In these two ‘books’ there is one page and one hand-print for each year of my life with the year written in pencil on the bottom-left and my age on the top-right. They overlap and stick, they are messy (as my life has been) and made of the dust of rocks that were once marine fossils, our common calcite frame.

PAX TEXANA - detail (copyright 2012 Bonnie McClellan, all rights reserved)

This attempt to make peace between my Texas past and my Italian present is included in the collage on the first page of the Cultural Atlas. The envelope from the gold leaf (delivered from Italy to Texas and then repatriated when I moved here) holds the book. Above the envelope is the word PAX – which speaks to the common Roman/Latin cultural roots between the two places – from the instructions for an IKEA shelving unit – representing a more recent, consumer empire that uses those common roots to try and make clients feel ‘at home’.

In Vocation of the Muse: Page One

In Vocation of the Muse by B. McClellan

In Vocation of the Muse

poetry by Bonnie McClellan

Illustrations by Matthew Broussard

02smoking copyright Matthew Broussard

Invocation of the Reader

This song is written for an audience of one.
for your eyes and your mouth alone;
in hope that you may catch
the cadence of my breath
in rhythm of these words,
as I felt Dante’s breath, weighted
against my lips, chanting out
a novena of tercets, beginning:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
che la diritta via era smarrita.

The straight path also lost to me,
I follow the sound of my voice
whispered across your lips.
Trembling at the gates of hell,
inside the silent center of this caesura
we inhale.

poems © Bonnie M. McClellan
images © Matthew Broussard

 

ALL OTHER POEMS FROM THE SERIES “In Vocation of the Muse” have been removed from this blog. If you would like to order a bound copy of the book complete with colour illustrations at a cost of 25.00 EURO ($35 USD) + postage and handling please contact me at: bmcclellan.lapoeta@gmail.com

Answer Inside a Question

we all bumble through
our stumbling ‘now’
our answers to the same question(s).
“Well now – not for the first time!”*

the think of marvelous awe
and best proof that i’ve ever found
that there is some shimmering “YES!”
in those vibrating strings:
of Lyre
of Voice
of the collapse and expand of cosmos’ breath:
organizing it into the chaos of a collapsing star,
is that we ask.

we ask

and the answer is in that question
those questions we’re all asking in unison
unified (perhaps not) only in this theoretical field
full of stars
collapsing
and bursting into being.

*(see Anne Carson’s second note on translating Sappho in “if not winter”)

Thinking about Jacques..

Thinking about Paris streets, a woman running with the wind blowing off her hat…asking for something she doesn’t really want. Playing with words in a language that isn’t mine but that I know well enough to find more than one meaning in.
Thinking about the kind of poetry we write and what makes an image ‘stick’… all of that and painting a gazebo that looks a bit like a Paris news stand…
If you want to go to an interesting place with foreign words go here: Paroles Vides
If you want to read about the woman who lost her hat on this street, go here: Rue de Seine
I’m off to paint…

The Anarchist Seed Swap

The anarchist seed swap was cool. A town up in the hills a ways past Luino had a get together at the recreation center where people came and exchanged seeds. Just showed up and put a chair next to a long table with piles of seeds and scraps of paper. Some, like me, showed up with seeds wrapped in a paper towel and stuffed in their jacket pockets. Then, in order to trade we had to…well, talk to people, people we didn’t know. That was the cool part, talking to people about what worked for them. There were lots of folks younger and some older and kids and dogs. While I was chatting with some ladies in their 60’s with a table full of bulbs, beans and zinnia seeds I overheard someone asking, “so how can I pay you for them?” and the laughing response, “you don’t, we’re doing it for love.” I went by that table tended by 3 young men, dreadlocks and tie-dye but with tidy beards and polite. The table next to them was full of leaflets and brochures…I recognized some from a pretty militant environmental group, Earth First!, that I hadn’t heard of since the 80’s. There were refreshments: tea, coffee, homemade baked things and dried fruit.
Robin had been taken in hand by an 8 year old boy who (while I watched from the window) took her over to see the deer and baby goats behind a fence at the edge of the park adjacent to the rec. center.
Then the group of people who were gathered on one side with musical instruments pulled themselves together in a group and everyone kicked back to listen to the music. They sang beautifully, the songs were…songs about anarchists in Lombardy or Switzerland who’d been imprisoned or killed and something like the anarchist anthem that they sang at the beginning and again at the end.
It was all in Italian, some of it in dialect…Matthew whispered in my ear, “Have you noticed that they’re anarchists? Not exactly what anyone in Texas would expect when you say ‘Anarchist'” It is true that a very tall fellow with a lovely baritone voice was wearing a black shirt with a hand-grenade on the front, and I’m sure that a lot of people, like us, were just there to swap seeds…
But, if you’re wondering, anarchists in Lombardia are nothing like this:

Meanwhile, I finally got some seeds for Cavolo Nero (fabulous tuscan ‘black cabbage’ that makes a wonderful sub for collard greens) and a few of the oregano seeds seem to be peeking up down in the garden. We also left with a pamphlet that one of the tidy young fellows gave to Matthew. The first article inside was entitled: “You may already be an Anarchist” I think Jeff Foxworthy may have a new tag line…