For whatever reason this painting by Georges Seurat, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, had morphed itself in my memory to The Birth of Venus by Botticelli. I have no idea why my mind remembered The Birth of Venus like this, I had to google "dot painting of a park" in order to even find Seurat's painting because it was buried so deep in my memory. I must have studied both of these paintings in my past art history classes, most likely separate classes at different points in my academic career and yet they showed themselves as one in the same in class when Sexson asked me to describe Botticelli's painting in class. So here is the "park" that in my minds eye I saw at the right of The Birth of Venus.
I was tricked. My own memory deceived me. I did a little more internet creeping to see if I could find a modern morph of these two paintings that I may have come across previously to explain my weird rendition of two very famous, very separate, very different paintings. I came up with nothing. But then I started to look at both paintings and realized that they could be connected. Botticelli does not provide viewers with what lies beyond the trees, and maybe that is where Seurat sought inspiration for his work. This is all my own speculation, and based solely on my thoughts. I have not looked up Seurat's life to see who he was actually inspired by, nor do i intend on ever looking at that, I just dot care that much.
This whole blog post however, ties into class because we morphed Stevens poems into our own back stories for it. By unpacking his poem we made them one with the "Postcard From a Volcano". I was simply writing what I saw in my mind when I read Stevens's poem. The title, and the words conjured up my own rendition of the poem. It has been interesting to read others backstories because they are seeing, and writing things, that never occurred to me. In this way we are all becoming tied to Stevens and the poem. Just as I became the obscure tie between Botticelli and Seurat.
No comments:
Post a Comment