Assignment 1: Preliminary Artwork and Critique

In this blog you'll find my first assignment created in Inkscape 0.46. The title of this piece is Brown Arc and is a response to Sylvia Plath's poem, 'Ariel'.

For context you can read about Plath's life and work at http://www.sylviaplath.info/biography.html,
see the text of this poem at Poem Hunter
(http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/ariel/)
as well as read some commentary on this complex work at http://www.english.illinois.edu/Maps/poets/m_r/plath/ariel.htm.
Maybe what you 'should' know is that 'Ariel' was a poem written during a highly creative period and within a year of her suicide.


I barely understand 'Ariel' myself, it 'contains' so many images, multiple meanings and several intertexual links within its brief form and I'm loathe to extract phrases from its structure. However, what follows are the sequences I'm responding to matched to the element and technique in the image above.


(1)
Line: "Stasis in darkness/Then the substanceless blue/Pour of tor and distances."

Element: blue background to the left of the image

Meaning: A freedom from stillness, trappedness and suffocation to brightness and space. There is both certainty and shapelessness. Note that a ‘tor’ is a hill. Plath was in a small house, in a cold winter, with small children and a turbulent marriage to British Poet Laureate (a poet appointed to write poems for special events on behalf of a nation), Ted Hughes.

Technique: I created a bottom layer and added to it a square the size of the page with the shape tool and then added a colour with the colour wheel, increased its translucency and added a gradient with a stop that decreased the colour right to left.

(2)
Line: "...sister to/The brown arc/Of the neck I cannot catch,"

Element: the brown arc coil.

Meaning: Horse and riding imagery to express movement, freedom and escape into the distance. There is identification with a 'twin soul', perhaps Hughes, but a sense that satisfaction can never be complete. Note also the sense of moving from brightness into darkness as identity becomes less focused and more uncertain with distance.

Technique: Drawn with the calligraphic tool, colour adjusted, sculpted for shape, cloned, dragged into a sort of coil with each arc increasingly blurred to give a sense of depth and upwards movement.

(3) Line: "Nigger-eye/Berries cast dark/Hooks ---//Black sweet blood mouthfuls,/Shadows."

Element: darkening filter to the right of the image

Meaning: The imagery is said to portray eating succulent blackberries, something you might find on an autumn ride in rural Britain. Although the imagery is sexual, like many of these lines, it is also dark, unsafe and portent-filled. (Note that commentators seem to get caught up in the use of the still taboo word ‘nigger’ by a US poet writing in the 1960s, a time of ‘freedoms’ emerging for non-white, non-middle-class, non-men in Western-style societies).

Without this overlying filter the image is bright and unambiguously cheerful; the filter suggests that the poem is richer, more complex than any single meaning we might feel more comfortable about. For instance, notice that in Plath's word imagery and my digital imagery brightness and darkness are linked. They are inevitable and a part of one another: one leads inescapably into the other - day to night, happiness to sadness, desire to its absence...and so on.

Technique: I created a separate layer and added to it a square the size of the page with the shape tool and then added black with the colour wheel, increased its translucency and added an effect with gradient left to right.

(4) Lines: "And now I/Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas./The child's cry/Melts in the wall.//And I/Am the arrow,/The dew that flies,/Suicidal, at one with the drive/Into the red//Eye, the cauldron of morning. "

Element: Red 'sun'

Meaning: In these lines there is hard and soft beauty, freedom, a momentary escape from earthly/domestic ties in an intense climax from the riding and/or sexual encounter and the drive and energy released that nourishes one afterwards. But there is ALSO danger, death and violence constantly present and towards which this vital energy is also directed.

Technique: I drew a circle with the Ellipse Tool, coloured it as red I could and applied an Object, Filter Effects – basically a blur, saturation and brightness.