The Poet as Artist
Really? Wow! For a long time I hadn’t realised Sylvia was an
accomplished artist. A chance internet search a good few years ago started to
drop hints.
I already had books by singers and rock stars showing their
artistic talent, but a poet was a pleasant surprise.
The drawings add another dimension to understanding how
Sylvia saw the world, what she imagined with her own eyes, giving further
insights and understanding to her work.
They also show what an important element art was in her life, once
saying in a letter to her mother Aurelia, that it was her deepest source of
inspiration.
However, I believe only two poems were directly referenced
through paintings - by Henri Rousseau and Paul Klee, indicating she was not a
prolific ekphrastic poet but more taking inspiration and emotional feelings to help
inspire her work.
Sylvia’s artworks augment the library and the imagination, stir visions of people and places and add context to her travels and locations.
Her art varies from quick, flick-of-the-wrist sketches to
time-sapping drawings in exquisite detail, in a variety of locations and
subjects from the Calder Valley, Paris, America and Spain among others.
Looking again through Crystal Gazer and the Mayor Gallery
exhibition books, I gazed upon a drawing of a lady as part of an elaborate
vase, a sweetcorn plant at her back, attached, entwined. It’s one of my
favourites and is pictured above. I wrote a short poem about it below.
Sylvia clearly had an eye for the unusual, the everyday and
the ornamental. Like her writing, her ‘art’ will continue to inspire.
The Lady in the Vase
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