A dialogue of orange joy
Updated: Jun 4
How can a piece of prose influence an artwork? How can an image inspire a sentence? How can both slowly evolve into food?
My most recent mail club edition felt different to me. It's the first time I collaborated with another artist – Wolfram Keller is a poet and academic based in Berlin – not just featuring someone's work, but actually entering a creative dialogue together and seeing where it goes. I had no idea how far it would take us.
It started in a café. I pitched Wolfram the idea of sharing his impressions from a Berlin market day with me. 4 beautiful and touching poems arrived in mailbox shortly after. Anticipation immediately reminded me of some memories of my own and I had my immediate visual reaction — colours, food, feeling — and I just knew.
Wolfram had asked me a few questions on how I perceived this experience and he also shared his experience:
The "At the market"-sonnets
Alex's proposal to collaborate on a project and the resulting idea for me to work with her
notes from her market walks to generate poetry that in turn might inspire a painting—and then a dish inspired by the combination of the three—sent me to the Kollwitzplatz’s
Thursday-market in search for inspiration pretty much the day after I received Alex’s notes: a worrisome quest given the threatening empty page one always faces when faced with a deadline.
But quickly scenes resonating with Alex’s notes began to materialize: her intriguing
coinage of “orange joy” for the youthful, seemingly carefree crowd at one end of the market, moms, the (bickering, loving) couples and families amidst the colorful scents of variegated fruits, vegetables and flowers at the other end, plus the fathers with their (excited, tired, sleeping) children among the market stalls, the playground, the benches etc. Three scenes, prompted by Alex’s walk-focuses and my own market day stuck with
me: remainders of the previous night visible everywhere, but focused on empty glasses, to be refilled later by the same or a different crowd with very different kinds of ‘anticipation’; the playful bickering of middle-aged people and their perspective on youthful indecision in the face of their own; a child sleeping on her father’s lap, peacefulness unaware of the obstacles and conflicts lying ahead, and yet a peacefulness so profound that it lasts a lifetime in its own strange ways.The three scenes combined into a (more traditional) sonnet, “At the market” with a varying rhyme scheme moving towards a—literally embracing—rhyme in the last stanza before the final couplet, picking up on the concluding, meditative-calming nature of market explorations I sensed in Alex’s notes: “A lingering harmony of smells sends me on my way, / Calmed, unworried, ready to face the tasks of the day”
And “At the market” then quickly sparked three more sonnets, each one responding in
greater detail to the three scenes, respectively. The one Alex picked for the June edition is the first of these, “Anticipation. ” The “orange joy” was the focal point here, but in a slightly different way than in Alex’s notes: the poem attempts to capture (inevitably from the vantage point of someone much older) the ways young people—I’m thinking of my students here, my daughter, Alex’s generation of people in their twenties—anticipate their futures, the moments of release and relief, the moments of doubts, of hesitation, peer pressure, the vicissitudes of decision making facing an uncertain future within what seems to be a very compressed temporality. The soundtrack while writing the poem wa —building another bridge to the lifeworlds of young Berliners perhaps—early German electronic music, reflected in the lack of rhyme scheme, save for the closing couplet, but counteracted by the occasional rhythmic hiccups.
Poetry/Art
Poetry—and the relatively short, 14-line sonnet—is my go-to place for reflecting about the
small everyday minutiae that often—and quickly—lead to the more profound questions of life, a movement of reflection that also drew me immediately to Alex’s art. My main interest in writing, I guess, lies in trying to understand others’ emotional worlds—and thereby reflecting my own ways of thinking, assuming, judging. And Alex’s invitation to contribute a text to her Inner Court-series last fall promoted the increasing awareness how abstract art— how Alex’s art—was facilitating similar processes, how canvases become mirrors engaging us in (emotional) reflection, of ourselves, of others, of otherness. And given how Alex’s art is inspiring such conversations and reflections that circle outward so easily and quickly from questions of form, color, texture to emotion, to life, I was very excited to explore how this dialogue would crisscross the boundaries of visual and verbal art forms, and how the world of—literally: taste—would add additional layers. I haven’t seen the painting yet, but an inspirational teaser, which we were blessed to experience with Alex’s corresponding dish, which in its seeming simplicity perfectly captures the feeling of the poem and what Alex shared with us about her reading of it. I cannot wait for her audience to experience this for themselves—and am exceedingly grateful for the opportunity to be part of so many many-leveled conversation about the arts in—and of—life, inspired by this collaboration.
WK: Why "Anticipation"? What resonated?
A: I chose Anticipation because of the immediate visual reactions it triggered in me- around food, colour, and feeling. But also because it resonated so deeply with a time in my life about ten years ago, when I discovered Berlin's underground music scene. I was very young then, and while I'm probably now at an age (26) where I "should" be going out more, I feel I lived that chapter so intensely and with so much joy that it never really left me. These days I do my clubbing at home and cherish my sleep, but that love for music runs deep in me, and Anticipation brought all of it back.
WK: Does the process—as a dialogue—connect at all to what your present body of work is concerned with?
A:The more I think about it, the more it does. The series I'm currently working on leans muchmore into presence and into being aware of my surroundings rather than painting purely from my internal world. Usually my canvases are very much about what's happening inside me, but this new series is about what I notice outside: temperature, people, small details, interactions, snippets of conversations I happen to pass by. I realised that this collaboration ties into that so perfectly. It's about sharing that outward gaze with someone else.
WK: In transferring word to image (in this case or generally) what comes first: color, form, motion? Was there a more concrete idea of what the painting will finally look like? Or does the idea develop, change within the process of painting with a rather vague idea in mind?
A: Honestly, I am not sure what comes first. It's difficult to put into words even as I try. I think
it's a mixture of everything. Sometimes I react with an image immediately; sometimes my
hand just starts moving before my mind catches up. A lot also depends on what state I'm in when I actually sit down to paint. Say I plan to paint on a Tuesday something I experienced a week ago: I'll have notes, some literal impressions, but if on that Tuesday I happen to be in a mellow, contemplative mood, even if the notes were leaning towards something lighter, both things find their way into the work somehow. That process of transformation from word to image is hard to define.
WK: How does food come into it—more generally, and specifically in this case? There’s so much more to it obviously than just the color palette—and this “more” that so intriguingly encapsulates stories, history, experience, is that immediately “there” as a taste? Just intrigued with the “Anticipation” -teaser and “Truce” about the ability of the interplay of artwork and food to map such complexities in—literally—palatable form!!!
A: Food is such a big part of my life - sometimes more than I'd like it to be haha. This idea that food is something we can share with others… I show my love for others through food - the process of creating (hopefully) a moment of joy for others brings a certain joy within me. But I find it fascinating to notice how I'm increasingly drawn to the process of translating an artwork onto a plate. What I've realised is that I'm not trying to depict an artwork literally through food and maybe that's where my abstract painting instinct comes through. Myfamily says I have a perfectionist streak ( I wonder where that came from **hint hint at my parents…), high standards etc. … and I don't always see it in myself, because I think it shows in what I create and in why I'm so drawn to abstract art. Because abstraction is, in a way, an escape from perfectionist thinking. There's so much room for interpretation. It doesn't need to make sense to everyone. Just to me.
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