Search

jennieytallman.com

a gallery of controversys

Open Search
Tag

image

in retrospect — some questions

Coronavirus sent me home from my day-job at the hospital on the third of April. I did not get *really* sick until a while later, around the 8th. I am now in some sort of extended and relentless recovery pattern. Short of breath most of the time, coughing, dizzy, confused, and spiking fevers long past the time I had thought I was done with this thing.

These days, I’ve been finding language and sentences fairly difficult. Notes, I can handle. Pictures, graphs, and charts: all fine. But words? Not so much.

temperature
resting pulse

Suddenly, I’m a person with inhalers and meds who has a hard time focusing on anything significant for more than a few minutes, tracking my temps and resting pulse and breaths per minute—I am told to give it time to pass and I trust it will.

Collages though? I could sit and do them all day long. So, here is the first of many.

PROMPT: make a wordless poem

a baggie of cut up words
an image covered in rubber cement

Continue reading “in retrospect — some questions” →

0

Paint Your Own Pictures

I am a pretty big fan of poems that allow the reader to make their own choices about how they should be read. So, that is what I’ve gone for here. Hence the title … do your own damn thing.

The full text of this poem reads: “Sing a song in 1989. I sing in June.”
This would be the most direct reading of this poem.
For the less obvious read, follow me.

paint-your-own-pictures-2Song 1989

I Sin Sing

Sin Son Gin

I sin gin in June

Continue reading “Paint Your Own Pictures” →

The Interrogation of the Ways

Today an image heavy post, with a sparse poem to accompany. In this case, I worked on the poem first, and then finished the image. Sometimes, certain words just pop out. In my case, it was “take care.”16-the-interrogation-of-the-ways-3

Also, never underestimate the incredible power of white paint piled against yellowed pages. Continue reading “The Interrogation of the Ways” →

“what you hear is a map of sound”

14-what-you-hear-1-1Today, a full page image/poem, meant to be a continuation of “bend and break in silence.”

For this poem I used a very simple process. I highlighted all instances of the word “sound” and then whited everything else out. I love using this technique because it lets you choose to leave some words only partly obscured, such as in the title image.

So, this is your creative prompt. Focus today on one word. Preferably a word that means something to you. Silence / Sound / Bend / Break. Continue reading ““what you hear is a map of sound”” →

Library of Water

For this page, the eleventh in the “Another Affair with Water” series, I was thinking about congruity–especially across the series.

11-library-of-water-2

The title echoes the series’ title.

Visually, it relates to the Broken White poem.

Poetically, both are between satire and abstraction.

Thematically, both come at a time when I am once again defeated by anger and sorrow at the ever-growing list of murdered black men. Continue reading “Library of Water” →

Intermission

We all need a little recess from time to time. For me, that time was today.

Today’s post and next Wednesday’s are both intermissions from the current project and both are translations.

Abstraction and Experimentation both ask us to find inspiration from others. This image is a complete translation of a work of art by Peter Halley.

intermission - 4

As quickly as possible, I translated his image into the below. Mine has an unexpected Americana feel.

intermission - 1 (1)

Continue reading “Intermission” →

The Survival of the Fish King

Forewarn: Physically uncomfortable as I began this post, I finally removed the snorkel and umbrella from the chair I have been sitting on too long. Which is to say, my youngest son is coughing on the sofa where he has been sleeping for the past 14 hours, the cat is screaming out the window at the oldest two for walking outside without her, and I have probably had less than 5 hours of sleep (nightly, not total) for the past week. Being an insomniac, this last is not really news.

THE SURVIVAL OF THE FISH KING matters now more than ever. If this post is goofy, it is because I am barely here.

survival of the fish king - 3
Part of right page image, “stained glass effect”

Continue reading “The Survival of the Fish King” →

Broken White

Sometimes your art will live in a safe and insular world and sometimes that world will have to open up and acknowledge the outside world too.

This past week has been grief filled. I have often written, in essay or poem, of the unwelcome privilege I have been afforded by the very authority that took the life of a good man, a neighbor. A man who shopped at the same grocery store as me and sat in the same traffic and clipped the same coupons.

 

Version 2

Continue reading “Broken White” →

The Eye is the First Circle

This cut-up poem is very hard to look at. The colors are just atrocious: almost all the hues are exactly the same value and saturation. This is such a huge no-no in design ( I should know: I attended a lot of art colleges and took Color Theory 101 at each one).

Blog - 5

But, honestly, the intensity is what I love about this and what drew me to the font in the first place. Continue reading “The Eye is the First Circle” →

Build Your Own Boat

What do you call a poem without words? A picture poem.

blogmain-1.jpg

I considered putting words on the page but decided the absence said enough. To be honest, I am confident that I could read this poem aloud if I was forced to. Certainly, I could speak to why I believe in it.

Here are some explanations for this piece. Continue reading “Build Your Own Boat” →

The Controversys

That is not a typo. That is the name of a line of boats. Down in the basement of a local bookstore this weekend, my sons grabbed a 1984 copy of Wooden Boat and a 2007 copy of Artforum for collage. Thus began a new project. And with the new project, a direction (finally) for this blog.

Blog - 8

I’ll document the progress here as I begin with these two magazines creating a page by page, no editing allowed, collection of “picture poems” (my youngest’s term for collage), erasure, and poetry experiments.

Continue reading “The Controversys” →

Create a website or blog at WordPress.com

Up ↑

%d bloggers like this: