Elena Maslova-Levin


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Home › Vita › Poetry of colour
Poetry of colour (November 2011 - ongoing)

As time goes by, I think of myself, more and more, as a painter of poems. This idea came to me seemingly by accident: I noticed that quieting my mind with a poem I know by heart, letting it "play" in the background, helps me concentrate on the process of painting. Gradually, I understood that whatever poem I choose, not only does it clean my mind from random noise and chases away various irrelevant "self-stories", but also noticeably influences the painting, as though striving to expresses itself through this new medium, re-tell itself in another language. Read more...

August (Marina Tsvetaeva and Boris Pasternak, after Boris Pasternak)
Magdalene ("Everyone is cleaning for Passover...", after Boris Pasternak and Marc Chagall)
Surrender
Let's scatter our words... (after Boris Pasternak)
Light without flame (after Boris Pasternak)
In the room of a poet in disgrace (after Anna Akhmatova and Paul Cezanne)
Punschlied (after Friedrich Schiller)
When art is over (after Boris Pasternak)
The fiery swish of summer (after Anna Akhmatova)
Irises ("Everyone is cleaning for Passover...", after Boris Pasternak)
Night's candles are burnt out... (after William Shakespeare)
Summer's honey breath (a study for sonnet 65, after William Shakespeare)
Stealing away the treasure of his spring (study for Sonnet 63) (5) (2014-05-20)
Insomnia. Homer. Taut sails (after Osip Mandelstam)
Let this sad interim like ocean be (a study for sonnet 56, after William Shakespeare)
Sunflowers ("When mighty Winter leads her shaggy squads...", after Alexander Pushkin)

With the beginning of work on "Sonnets in colour" in January 2012, this way of painting has taken over my studio practice almost completely, even beyond the sonnets themselves. It is a complex process, full of surprises and fleeting insights; a process I don't fully understand yet. In some ways, it's similar to the process reflected in the "Connections" series: lending my eyes and my brush to the expression of something outside myself, larger than my self. But it's also different: it goes deeper into the invisible and unsayable, to where there is no difference between painting and poetry; and it depends on other kind of semantic and rhythmic waves and involves not only my sense of vision, but my mind as a whole.

In this gallery, I collected individual "poem paintings": just a painting per poem, my search for different ways to represent linguistic meanings and rhythms might in colours and lines. Small series of "poem paintings" (three or more paintings per poem) are shown in the "Found in translation" section of this website.