Author’s Commentary
Brian Swann was
educated at Queens’ College, Cambridge (BA, Double First, English Tripos), and
Princeton (PhD). He has taught at Princeton and Rutgers, and is now Professor
of English at the Cooper Union. He has published in hundreds of magazines and
journals, including Criticism, ELH (English
Literary History), Nineteenth Century
Fiction, and Poetry. At present
he is working on an Algonquian Reader. He was editor of “The Smithsonian Series
of Studies on Native American Literatures”. He is author of a number of books
for children, including A Basket Full of
White Eggs (Orchard/Franklin Watts), Touching
the Distance: Native American Riddle-Poems, and The House With no Door: African Riddle-Poems (both
Browndeer/Harcourt Brace). He has been a recipient of a NEA fellowship in
fiction and a CAPS grant in poetry. Since 1980 he has been poetry editor of
“OnEarth” formerly “The Amicus Journal” (Natural Resources Defense Council),
and was Director of the Bennington Writing Workshops from 1987-91. He is also a
painter, represented by Pierogi Gallery, NYC.
Artist’s
Statement
I come to
painting by way of a long career with words. I am by occupation a writer and
scholar, and am currently working on my 44th book in a repertory which includes poetry, fiction, foreign
language translation, children’s books and Native American Studies. However,
through it all, I have always felt a need to paint and have, in fact, been
painting sporadically for many years, mostly in the form of acrylics, collages
and drawings, some of which have been published in literary journals and books.
But it was only when my wife and I bought a place on a side of a mountain in
the Western Catskills some six years ago that I allowed myself significant
amounts of time for my painting. It was here, by chance, that I discovered a
technique that enabled my work to move in what I believe to be new and exciting
directions. More or less by accident, I began to combine a variety of unlikely
materials and tools—Color-Aid papers, glue, White-Out, fixative, powdered
chalks, colored inks, casein emulsion, pens, small brushes, a putty knife—out
of which has evolved a style (in reality, several styles) which is in good part
directed by the process itself. The result has been an imagery that is
predominantly abstract but at the same time suggestive of shapes, forms, and
figures. The work is occasionally, and fortuitously, evocative of enamels or
stained glass, but without the stories. For I never really intended a
“narrative,” though the paintings do have a trajectory, do make a journey. They
create a kind of perspectival depth, even trompe-l’oeil space, that wants to
engage, intrigue and entice the viewer. These works are tiny paradoxes, both
sensual and remote, detached and beguiling. They push and pull, extend and retreat,
often in an almost biomorphic manner. They respond, as if to touch. And they
draw the viewer in, demanding something like meditation. You really see them
when you fall into them.
As my work has
progressed over the half-dozen years of its existence, it has moved through
numerous, distinct stages, none anticipated, none calculated. (When I say “it
has moved” I am reminded that many Algonquian-speaking people regard stories as
having a life of their own, the same as anyone else). My paintings find themselves
forming series, united sometimes by theme, sometimes by technique or manner.
These "series" often seem to have a natural lifespan, an impetus of
their own internal design. Forms, small almost-narratives and themes, rise up
and present themselves to me from the surface of the paper and there, without
seeking, I find them –a process, by the way, not unlike the way I discover
forms and images in accumulations and juxtapositions of words for my poems. One
of the ways I find them is to create difficulties for myself, seeming
impossibilities. I court failure. I work myself into what seems an inescapable,
and even ugly place, a cul-de-sac, and then, by trial and error, find a way out
into somewhere I’ve never seen before. This keeps everything exciting and unpredictable,
and often frightening.
These small
painted rectangles (all about 7” by 9”) have the deceptive look and feel of oil
paintings, and the deceptive scale of large canvasses. Much of the effect of my
paintings is due to the illusion of diminutive sizes suggestive of grand, even
monumental, scale. Their small surfaces do not seem to be able to contain the
energy the images upon them generate. The imagery strains against its
confinement. The organism expands and contracts as if to lay visual claim to even
more physical territory, occupy more space. They are miniatures of concentrated
and ambitious allusiveness.
THE NATURE POET
CONTEMPLATES A WINDFARM
Brecht once
wrote a poem about the violent leafing of trees,
irreversible, before the city took over;
about how there now
seem to be
storms still, high above, but all they touch
is our aerials. As I look through washed
air across
to the ridge
that always sat down with me at dinner,
gray in winter, green in summer, it
suddenly takes off
and moves
around, a stately swoosh swoosh swoosh from higher
than Lady liberty. There it goes, driving
down the odd slow crow
or heron and
real estate values. It’s come to save us all
on a green hill that’s not far away but
right here
in my salad. The
locals, a dozen families related
many times over, sit on all the boards,
sell everything
they can and
make fun of us refugees behind our backs.
Their ancestors would be proud, snoring in
the lovely
graveyard above
the white clapboard Old School Baptist church
with spectacular views they never had time
to look at.
And those screws
that dwarf the Titanic’s swump on
round and round, pulling up the entire
valley, sucking
it up—remaining
cows, some horses, a llama or two,
a bear, coyote, few bobcats, geese, rocks
and stones and trees,
there they go,
caught up by slo-mo dervish, so they
don’t know which end’s up, and like me, who
came
here seeking the
still point of the turning world (Eliot),
that stillness in the midst of chaos
(Bellow), the
still heart’s
core (Yeats), they’re probably way beyond irony.