How paintings have inspired my poems

At the heart of the poetry project was a feeling of wonder - wonder at the skill of the artist, and also wonder at what the artist meant to convey, always aware that my intuition might be very different from others' responses. This sense of ambivalence is most clearly displayed in Surrealist paintings - “What is going on?”.

Here are two examples:
Magritte's Pandora's Box was to me enigmatic, with its bowler-hatted, faceless gentleman conjoined with the ancient Pandora myth - her audacious, curious opening of the forbidden box which proved to contain not divine powers but all the evils of the world. My interpretation showed a failed epiphany - a moment of potential transformation which the conventional, timid man could not realise:

“The aura
Fades as darkness settles and is gone.
His black coat merges with the night; he moves on.”

But I know that other interpretations are possible, as I discovered when discussing the work with a small audience at Oxted Library.

Likewise, Dorothea Tanning's A Little Night Music was also mysterious. The two girls (sisters/alter egos?) formed such a contrast with the terror of the nightmare, the “thing” seemingly changed into the “magic” of new-found pleasure. Daisies, sunflowers, serpents, blood, doors closed and ajar added to the enigmatic quality of the work. The first girl

“Stands petrified, cold stone,
Ignorant, not knowing where
Past innocence has flown”

while the other girl,

“Clasps her bright treasure -
Light, plucked from the sun,
And dreams
Of the new-found pleasure
She has newly won.”

My hope is that any readers of the poems will be prompted to seek their own interpretations, if not definitive explanations, for the elusive, shifting quality of art and poetry always remains.

 

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