Amy Banker NOW
at Janos Gat Gallery
Weaving and Dust

On View:
at Janos Gat Gallery
1100 Madison Avenue at 82nd Street
New York, NY 10028

Photo © Tracey Gudwin
Amy Banker at the Studio

Cooking, as all, is strangely precise, like art, painting, sculpture, music. It either does the thing or not . . . The thing is a work sprung from the dance of intelligence among the forms . . . A work that is self-evident. It can be a single work or many, needing no explanation, or philosophy, or reaction to any condition . . . The message is a larger splinter imbedded in the art: creation.

See how sharp one must be in cooking, painting, composing, poetry. Poetry gets an odd image, in that poetry is thought of as vacant, arbitrary, vaporous, witty, mystical. Actually, in the real thing nothing is more exact: a blasted star.

Van Gogh's painting of the crows in a field, one of his last is deemed to be a portent of disaster -- in the center: A road leading to nowhere, the black crows a symbol of death. No! this view is one of the basic hatred of painting. There are those that make out of something that is decorative, sentimental, pornographic, sensational -- which makes truth invisible.

There are those that out of nothing make something. "To airy nothing gives a local habitation and a name." (Shakespeare) The Van Gogh landscape is a goregeous impasto brushing of a crushed jeweled blue sky, his heart apparently in touch with the wild crows, black checks activating the blue over the complement of a gold field of wheat, punctuated with a reddish shape around, cut off by the need of plastic demands made by elements in the painting, brought together by the painter in the dance of art, which is creation.

In Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, this proof of poetic power exists even to excess.

It is throughout as if a superior spirit, more intuitive, more intimately conscious, even than the characters themselves, not only every outward look and act, but of the flux and reflux of the mind in all it's subtlest thoughts and feelings, were placing the whole before our view; himself meanwhile unparticipating in the passions, and actuated only by that pleasurable excitement, which has resulted from the energetic fervor of his own spirit in so vividly, what is so accurately, and profoundly contemplated.

I think, I should have conjectured from these poems, that even then a great instinct, which impelled the poet to the drama, was secretly working in him, prompting him by a series and never broken chain of imagery, always vivid and because unbroken, often minute; by the highest effort of the picturessque in words, of which words are capable, higher perhaps than was ever realized by any other poet, even Dante not excepted; to provide a substitute for that visual language, that constant intervention and running comment, by tone, look, and gesture, which in his dramatic works he was entitlted to expect from the players.

 

© Amy Banker 2007
The Phoenix and the Dove

Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis seem at once the characters themselves, and the whole representation of those characters by the most consummate actors.

You seem to be told nothing, but to see and hear everything.

Hence it is, that from the perpetual activity of attention required on the part of the reader; from the rapid flow, the quick change, and the playful nature of the thoughts and images; and above all from the alienation, and if I may hazard such an expression, the utter aloofness of the poet's own feelings, from those of which he is the painter and the analyst; that though the very subject cannot but detract from the pleasure of a delicate mind, but never was poem less dangerous ... on moral account.

It has been before observed that the images however beautiful. though faithfully copied from nature, and as accurately represented in words, do not themselves characterize the poet.

Instead of degrading and deforming, passion into appetite the trials into the struggle of conscience, Shakespeare has here represented the animal impulse itself, so as to preclude all sympathy with it, by dissipating the reader's notice amongst the thousand onward images, and now beautiful, now fanciful circumstances, which form its dresses and scenery; or by diverting our attention from the main subject by those frequent witty or profound reflections, which the poet's ever active mind has deduced from or connected with, the imagery and the incidents.

The last character I shall mention, which would prove indeed but little, except as taken conjointly with the former; yet without which the former could scarce exist in a high degree, and(even if this were possible) would give promises only of transitory flashes and a meteoric power, is DEPTH, and ENERGY OF THOUGHT.

The reader is forced into too much action to sympathize with the nearly passive in our nature. As little as a mind thus roused and awakened by brooded on by mean and indistinct emotion, as the, low lazy mist can creep upon the surface of the lake, while a strong gale is driving it onward in waves and billows.

They become proofs of original genius only as far as they are modified by a predominant passion; or by associated thoughts or images awakened by that passion; or when they have the effect of reducing multitude to unity, or succession to an instant, or lastly, when a human and intellectual life is transferred to them from the poet's own spirit ...

No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher.

For poetry is the blossom and fragrancy of all human knowledge, human thoughts. human passions, emotions, language. In Shakespeare's poems, the creative power, and the intellectual energy wrestlee as in a war embrace.

Each in its excess of strength seems to threaten the extinction of the other.

At length, in the DRAMA they were reconciled, and fought each with its shield with the breast of the other.

Or like two rapid streams, that at their first meeting within narrow and rocky bands mutually strive to repel each other, and intermix reluctantly and in tumult; but soon finding a wider channel and more yielding shores blend, and dilate, and flow on in one current and with one voice.

-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Reprinted from The Janos Gat Gallery Publication

© Amy Banker 2007
The Ugly Duckling