A Warm Game Of Texas Hold ‘Em (Haiga) – 6/52, BlackBerry 52 – WEEK 6, Golden Valley, Minnesota, February 11th 2011, photo © 2011 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved. Medium: Digital BlackBerry photograph altered in Adobe Photoshop Elements 6.0, Font: Myriad Pro.
After reading the Lunar New Year postcard from Lotus (her BlackBerry52 Jump-Off for Week 6), I started to think about how we don’t know each other in person. We are vulnerable only through our poetry, writing, artwork, the years of conversation that have taken place in this quiet space. There is a long stretch of road, I-35, that connects the landscape between us. Part of her knows this place; her mother once lived in Minnesota. We stare at the same moon, sun, planets and stars.
I was scraping ice dams off the roof last week, and happened to look up behind the blade I was wielding. There between the brilliant blue branches of the oak and ash peered the Bone Moon. The Ancients sometimes called February’s moon the Snow Moon. I reached into my pocket, grabbed the BlackBerry, and snapped off a shot of the sky. It became the backdrop for a haiga, an unbroken expanse of words extending all the way to Texas.
The blue? For Valentine’s Day, Liz asked me on a date to the Walker to see the work of neo-Dada painter Yves Klein — With the Void, Full Powers. I was moved by the architecture of air, the fire paintings, his relationship to the elements, the Anthropométries (human paintbrushes), and the Ex-Voto dedicated to Rita, the Patron Saint of Lost Causes. I walked slowly through a white-walled room of blue monochromes, Klein’s Blue Period. I’ve never seen blue look so beautiful. Blue for the skies of Winter. Blue for communication and expression. Blue for the Blues.
Blue has no dimensions. It is beyond dimensions, while the other colors have some. These are the psychological spaces. Red, for example, presupposes a hearth giving off heat. All colors bring forth associations of concrete, material, and tangible ideas, while blue evokes all the more the sea and sky, which are what is most abstract in tangible and visible nature.
–Yves Klein (1928 – 1962)
Through color I feel the sentiment of complete identification with space; I am truly liberated.
–Yves Klein (1928 – 1962)
_______________
Lotus and I will continue our call and response by posting a BlackBerry photo for the 52 weeks of 2011. Feel free to join us if you wish (learn about the project’s beginnings at BlackBerry 52 Collaboration). To read more about Lotus, visit her at alotus_poetry on Twitter (where she writes poetry every day in community with other Twitter poets), at Poetry By Lotus, and on her Flickr account.
-related to posts: Best Of BlackBerry 365 — First Quarter SlideShow, BlackBerry 365 Project — White Winter Squirrel, Flying Solo — Dragonfly In Yellow Rain, Searching For Stillness, icicle tumbleweed (haiga) — 2/52, The Mirado Black Warrior, The Dying Art Of Letterwriting (Postcards From The Edge)
-posted on red Ravine, Wednesday, February 16th, 2011
QM, WOW!! How did you do this photo? It looks like the branches are coated in ice…just amazing! Your talent with words and photos should be compiled into a book. (not so subtle hint…) I love the poem, as well. Reminds me of what someone said…”Reach for the moon, even if you might not get it, at least you will be among a thousand stars.” (I’m paraphrasing, but it goes something like that.)
I like the contrast of the cool and the warm, too.
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As usual, I always learn something when I read your musings. I have never heard of Yves Klein. I read the interview and am intrigued by this concept, “Immaterial sensibility” as a form of faith. I am trying to refine my sensibility to the point of having a version of faith that I come to depend on and trust. Surely, this is what art helps us do if we keep returning to it, relying on it, allowing it to transform us and our relationship to life.
I love that quote “blue has no dimensions”. It happens to be my favorite color. Maybe it explains my rebellion against limitation!
Your photo and words evoke that realm outside of dimension…beyond planets and stars.
Thanks for sharing and opening my world to more art and beauty and high ideals.
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oliverowl, thank you! I always love when you stop by. I picture you in Wyoming nestled near Heart Mountain. I am humbled by your thoughts on the photo. I’m using the BlackBerry 52 Collaboration with Lotus to experiment and get to know Photoshop better. I don’t have the full version, am using Elements. So I’m trying to learn about combining color, text, texture and trying to figure out how all the layers work.
I’m such a Moonchild. The Bone Moon will be full at 2:36am CST tomorrow, February 18th. It’s also the Snow Moon and goes by a number of other common names. I like the idea that none of us can be larger than the skies, planets, moons. We are all human, put our clothes on one arm or leg at a time, no matter what’s going on in the rest of our lives. I miss you! By the way, thank you for the gogyohka and card for the red heart day. It is beautiful. You have a gift for the short poetry forms. I love reading your poetry.
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Teresa, you are a deep thinker. I like that about you. I’m so glad you read the interview connected to the Ex-Voto link and his piece “Ex-Voto dedicated to Saint Rita of Cascia” by Yves Klein, 1961. It was one of my favorite pieces in the show (although I was blown away by his Blue Monochromes). It seemed like the Ex-Voto piece summed up his spiritual beliefs in one fell swoop. And it seems it wasn’t really meant to be discovered:
It also contained a few of his gold pieces from the “Immaterial Sensibility” ritual he did where he sold zones of immaterial pictorial sensibility to patrons for gold ingots which were later cast into the Seine. There were black and white photos of the ritual in the exhibition.
You would have liked it. I knew little to nothing about him before Liz took me to the exhibit. Now I can’t stop thinking about it. You should have seen his fire paintings which he did using a torch to paper while someone sprayed the paper with water so it didn’t catch on fire.
Klein studied Zen Buddhism in Japan and also was a follower of Rosicrucianism which is explained as a mystical theology that promotes the belief that all space is filled with spirit and that one day we will live free of form, capable of levitation by thought alone. He seemed so passionate about his work! I was really inspired!
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