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May 21: The other day, I was thinking about something a poet friend of mine said about my From Haiku To Lyriku--that I digressed a lot. Geof Huth said the same thing in the review he did of the book at his blog. Both seemed to consider it a flaw that the virtues of the book made up for. I was a little surprised at the charge, for I tried hard to give the book a strong unifying principal. Not that I think I did not digress, but (so I thought) only as a branch digresses from the trunk of a tree, not as some momentarily visiting bird does. Except a few times.
Now, I'm not so sure. I'll have to reread the book to find out. Meanwhile, I came up with a counter: that a reader can fail to appreciate a unifying principle as easily as a writer can fail adequately to put one in. An example I immediately remembered was of a diptych I did at Valley Junior College in a design class that a girl, asked to critique it by the teacher, characterized it as too busy. Maybe it was. But maybe she couldn't appreciate its unifying principle--which I, to be frank, thought possibly too overt.
Tomorrow, or in some entry here soon, I hope to post the diptych. I mention it here because when I was hunting for it, I came across the following acrylic:
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I did it sometime in the sixties when, for a brief time, I was fooling around with acrylics. I didn't think much of it then, but when I saw it yesterday, it looked pretty damned good to me. In fact, I wondered if I've gotten any better at non-representational illumages since I did it--as in the following two illumages from 2005:
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I think the two recent illumages may be a bit more sophisticated than the earlier one, but I'm not sure. The latter, by the way, is 9 inches by 12 inches, and perhaps 10 percent better in the orignal than reproduced here. I do think there's a basic way I do these things that has been consistent over the years. All the colors, for one thing. Use of contrasts. A frequent pull of the design from one of the lower corners to the upper corner on the opposite side.
I like the early (untitled) piece well enough to be confident I'll use it, or a portion of it, in a mathemaku one of these days.
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