Insight Into Creativity: Art Transliteration

       ⚠  Warning—this aesthetic philosophy deep-dive might be too inscrutably byzantine for you.

call-back to Under-Overwhelming essay

          Pretentiously vainglorious prefaces, titles, and abstruse words (like these) serve the same purpose as height-requirement signs at theme parks.

          To those who’ve chosen to jump off this cliff, heedless of the challenges, I commend you for your open-mindedness, willingness to try your brain at new concepts, and your marathon-level attention span (if you make it to the end).

          And to those comfortable within this ken: I thank you—up-front—for perusing the word-imagery fabrications of a philosopher-artist such as myself.  Please bear-with my liberal application of monsieur em-dash, madame hyphen, and cousin parenthesis.

hover for brief description �🔗 click for magnification or link

          Transliteration normally refers to slowly transcribing/translating—one character, word, symbol or hieroglyph at a time—one language into another.  Because art and poetry can seem like a foreign language, I’m going to crawl around inside my own gulliver and explain how I created both the two-dimensional artwork and poem titled: woad poem.  (Links are provided to add superfluous details or permit examining referenced artwork.  Did I mention this is a deep dive?) 

It Begins With a Mote of Detritus With Pearl-Potential:  Unsurprisingly, first ideas about a new creation can be born-out-of (borrowed from) works of others, or inspired by the artist’s earlier work.  When I saw this strong-contrast image of a nude—in December 2019 (while scrounging for creepy images for the collage AULDLANGSYNE's Mailbox)—I recognized it would be perfect for a future artwork and got out my butterfly net.

Architect’s Eye, Engineer’s Ingenuity and the Passion of a Serial-Killer:  When my time-to-create gland woke-up from a nap, I “found” about 50 similarly-stark images and began to experiment—slicing, smoothing, spinning, and fine-tuning.  After many days of failing to get even a tickle of that solving-the-puzzle feeling (I never became fully-absorbed) I stopped trying to hammer-tune this crap craft into something aesthetically pleasing to me.

Disappointing Creations Need Titles Too:  First I stared at it, then wondered about it, and—eventually—understood what failed to happen: I’d enjoyed the process of finding “just right” image slices, but received no spark during sculpt-construction.  I was enthralled by the building blocks but I disliked the structure.  So, I devised a jarring meta-title: imagine a suggestively-confusing title here.  (Meta because a title asking you to think of a title, is eating its own tale; and jarring because the adverb-adjective sticks in one’s word-smithery—it is not really the opposite of confusingly-suggestive which slides smoothly from eye to lizard-brain, but not-not the opposite either.)

A Realization-Reenactment (Focused on Aesthetics):  While doing the aforementioned disappointed-staring and title-devising, my attention kept returning to the left-side of the artwork.  What was drawing my eye?  Was I merely recognizing the first found-image pearl in that section?  Maybe a change in distance?  Thumbnail mode caused my interest to definitely be re-piqued, but, in close-up, the miasma of interlocking/overlapping shadows, edges, silhouettes, and flimsy fragments of fifty female photo-montaged forms forced my curiosity to flee (whew).  But, the leftmost portion—no matter if distant or full-screen—remained intriguing and its abstract-composites continued to tantalize.

A Literal Return to the Drawing Board:  With the leftmost portion as a focal-point, I restarted the cut-stitch-paste-gluing engine.  This lasted for a few daze.  After becoming deeply engrossed in the process, trimming and/or deleting about fifteen of the most detailed original images, changing the color pallet on at least ten, and totally redesigning the size and focus, the resulting artwork works.  For me.  And that’s all a creator can use to determine finish-quality.  It is appropriately asymmetrical, contains both blurred and crisp details, and the rest is mere suggestion, hint, and supposition.  Pleasing to the eye.  Maybe a smidgen-creepy, but that adds to the allure.

The More Difficult the Self-Challenges the Less Challenging the Self-Difficulties:  Sounds like an aphorism, but challenging myself is a successful way to keep creating.  My art keeps me learning.  I decided to craft a poem to accompany this artwork, incorporating a phrase I coined in a letter:

...The little things are the big things.  The big things might be able to take care of themselves, but ‘death by a million tiny cuts’—as metaphor—has an antithesis ‘bliss by a million tiny kisses’...

Critics Refer to This Next Part as a Pointless Tangent; I Prefer to Call it a Brief Aside:  I think it helps to think about a few claims made by Nietzsche in his 1872 work, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music:

...the existence of mankind only appears to be justifiable when it is viewed as an aesthetic phenomenon...
...the highest form of artistic creation depends on some form of tension between opposing forces...

          Nietzsche's book is a dense, complexly-expansive, review of classical Greek dramatic theater and music.  Fourteen years later, in 1886, it was republished as The Birth of Tragedy, or: Hellenism and Pessimism with a second preface—written by Nietzsche himself—titled An Attempt at Self-Criticism.  (The first preface, in both, was written by the composer Richard Wagner . . . yes that Wagner, of antisemitism infamy.)

          I found this excerpt from his self-criticism poignant, not only because he describes yours-truly, but he appears to be describing (with sarcastic self-deprecation) his “target audience”:    

...artists with analytical tendencies with a capacity for retrospection (the type whom it’s always necessary to seek-out but with-whom one never wants to seek) who are also full of psychological innovations and artist’s-secrets...

The Nuts and Brain-Bolts Leading Up to My Two Dimensional Artwork waod poem:  My artwork descriptions, above, are definitely synopsis after-the-act.  I was not thinking about how my mind was working as it was creating.  (I understand some with less high-functioning autism are hampered by meta-meta thoughts-about-thoughts and—unfortunately—get bogged down, can't climb out of their own way, and suffer because of it.)  In looking back, I recall that my odd-intuitive-creative neurons (my only nod to NEFND in this essay) encouraged my imagination, which influenced me to begin with the strong-contrast nude I caught in my butterfly net, which—in-turn—eventually led me to craft the final “found image” collage-compilation from dozens of (fair-use-borrowed or copyright-stolen*) erotic images.

          I cropped the blackspace, mirror-flipped it, imagined the word poem reversed-upsidedown would approximate the word waod.  [Climbing deeper: Actually, my thoughts snag-focused on the ash diphthong in the word aesthetic and, subsequently, I zoomed in on the visual near-symmetricality of m-w and p-d...which came very near (rch-close) to a voila moment...and a title was born.]  Then I added the words, as title, at the mirror point and extended a small amount of white-grey to the left-edge's mirror point (literally a point) because I wanted to “break the rectangle rule” just a tiny bit.

The Bizarre Gears-and-Gristle-Soup Beneath the Circuitry of the Poem:  With this, I had a tall, thin, abstract image, which I could place vertically—adjacent to my as-yet-unwritten poem.  I also had a title.  And, I had the phrase: bliss by a billion tiny kisses.  That was all enough.  Because, by focusing on what I possessed, I discovered my theme.

 

          My life is not unlike many other people’s lives:  I have my share of missed opportunities and lost connections.  So, I would write a poem about tying together all the disconnected plot points.  Years ago, I wrote a short story about dénouement (where I only explained “what the characters were doing” in the final paragraphs).  So I began with:   

rarely are there anymore breathtaking dénouements in this place outside of

          This place? . .the world . . . the Internet . . . this blog . . .  or . . . 

 

          Intentionally ending in a dangling preposition (a broken grammar rule) causes the reader to assume the next line will complete the phrase (even though there is a large paragraph-break space between lines) and the brain is already filling in the gap: ...outside of Hollywood blockbusters? ...outside of novels?  ...outside of where!  And, I begin the next line without explaining.  The first line of the poem is an example of a hanging plot point, with a link to a relatively long story about dénouement (but one would need to know the definition to appreciate any of this).   Second line also ends in a preposition, but the phrase is completed in the third line.
 

yet as I crafted an important series of sentences for my son I stumbled on

bliss by a billion tiny kisses  (the antithesis of death’s trillion tiny cuts)

          Since I linked a word in the first line, I chose to do it again.  My second link was to the definition of idiom, which stumbled on and coin a phrase, are examples of.  My third line breaks the pattern (does not end in a word which normally begins a phrase) and, instead of linking to the definition of a word, links to the description of a ancient torture technique called Lingchi, which I point out is the opposite of my bliss by a billion tiny kisses.

          My forth line, however, does end in a preposition, and I continue the pattern by describing two more different types of cutting (the first medical the second figurative).

 

barely realized unless our split-brained attention is riven; focus forced into

          The fifth line continues the phrase begun at the end of the forth (with no links) but contains a line derived from my previous essay pertaining to underwhelming and overwhelming events: in that essay I posit that momentous events aid in the formation of long-term memories (which is also connected to this deep dive's first image).  More important to this poem, in this line, I begin with a statement and turn it into a question which suggests we all fail to take notice when we happen to do something for the first time in our lives (like thinking about how this poem was word-smithed).

novel-for-you non-momentous events; happening right now, or isn’t this a first for 

 

          I end the fifth line with a preposition but complete the phrase in the sixth line (which wasn't my only use of alliteration; another example: series of sentences for my son I stumbled) with a question about the composition of the poem itself.  I then begin another sentence which relies on the reader understanding the unwritten connection of what the pronoun it is referring to (which is: the poem itself):

encouragement and compliance of contemplation of this composition?   Today it’s

          In the seventh line I continue the sentence with the idea that when I posted the poem it would be at the top of my blog (metaphorically the capstone) which is a series of stories one-atop-the-previous (like a totem pole)—two different metaphors in one, referred to mixing metaphors, which is also a grammatical no-no.  And I provide a link to who was president when I began the blog in 2004:

s n a p p e r h e a d ’s totem pole capstone, which was begun in forty-three’s day

          The eighth line begins a new sentence, which jars the brain slightly, because line seven did not end in a period and this line did not begin with a capital letter (the intent is to force readers to engage level 2 thinking and read slower).
         

tomorrow waod poem’s intricate reflection collage silhouettes will be unburied 

 

          The ninth line proposes a distant-future presidency when people (myself, hopefully, included) will re-read this poem and wonder at the poet’s prescience (2028 or 2032).

while conducting future memory mining exercises during AOC’s presidency

          The tenth and eleventh lines, are thematically connected to previous ones (time-frames related to US presidential administrations), which might-be building toward a plot?  Maybe, possibly?  [Obviously this was written before-during Trump’s first impeachment, otherwise it would have been plural (impeachments).] 

which requires every one of us to live thru overwhelming/underwhelming

events during The Buffoon’s impeachment and then place their recall 

 

           The twelfth line alludes to the similarity between our human ability to recall memories and the Internet’s ability to recall items (like this poem) using keywords.  This line, again, ends in a preposition.

codes in squire where they may get dusty but never so unused as to 

 

          While the thirteenth line (and the fifteenth line) completes the prepositional phrase begun in the twelfth line (and the fourteenth line), the fourteenth line breaks that pattern by beginning with a preposition–both showing and telling the reader: one way to point out one’s awareness of man-made grammar rules is to intentionally bend them.  And, then, suggests a related idea: that morals are also man made.  

draw attention to bending the ground rules while recognizing they exist 

 

for the sole purpose of being broken — morality may be completely inside of 

 

          After the dash in the middle of the fourteenth line, a statement begins (about where morality might be found), which then becomes the beginning of a question in the fifteenth line (about the woad poem artwork’s sexual imagery . . . considered immoral by puritans), there, the poem intentionally causes a mental hiccup.  The reader sees the question: would the artwork, but “hears” would the art work (as in: would the art succeed if it were less delicately prurient?)  My aim was to ask: would it accomplish the task of catching-and-holding the attention of viewers if my art was more blatant—and I provide a link to a NSFW example, for those who might be in need of what I mean by blatant.  Which is answered by the poet-artist-myself at the end of the sixteenth line. 

creative words generated by millions of imaginations but would this artwork if 

 

less delicately prurient or without its attention catch-hold — I suggest it would not 

 

          The seventeenth/final line is a call-back-bookend bringing the poem to a close by returning the POV back to first-person (begun in the second line).  It also intentionally causes another mental hiccup wherein the reader is "tricked" when assuming the end of the sixteenth line completed the rhetorical question (it posed to itself) and, then, realizing the answer has continued (into a different/unasked question).  And that answer explains that this poem, this art, is only important now to those who read it or look at it.  Which is my closing to say: thank you, to you, when you view.

 

          The art and the poem were—like every creation of all creators—immensely important to me, at-the-time, when I was creating them.  But, then my brain moved on.  To the next idea, the next instinct-driven concept, and it (my brain) uses the ideas that got stuck-plastered in place from the creating-sculpture-thoughts to inform my next thing.

be valued any less by me, its creator, who considers every view, by you, a tiny kiss

* Subject for another day’s essay.  “Most-people” are unable to be objective and always bring their personal agenda to a fair-use versus copyright debate.  I always try to give credit to creative people, even when all they do is screech “mine.mine.mine.”  (But I realize I do not have to pay my landlord with the proceeds of my creativity.)  I disdain people artists like Lars Ulrich and champion creatives like Aaron Swartz.  Which indicates where my personal agenda lies, and that I'm aware of my place in the phalanx of “most-people”.  

 

odder pins and flypaper ideas:

 

twilight zone artwork de-construction

where philosophy fodder comes and goes

 

final word: ...you know the rules and so do I...