This workshop explores poetry and paintings that prompt us to reflect on colour: how it works to affect us, what meanings might come to be associated with particular colours, and also how poetry and painting can be understood as related in more ways than one.
Thanks to one of the group for recommending this rich topic.
The Texts
William Carlos Williams, ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ (1923)
Angelina Weld Grimké, ‘The Black Finger’. (1925)
Yves Klein, artist, International Klein Blue paintings – you can learn more from The Tate Gallery
Some quotes from Klein we’ll especially be thinking about:
‘Colour is sensitivity in material form, substance in its purest form.’
‘Blue has no dimensions, it is beyond dimensions, whereas the other colours are not….All colours arouse specific associative ideas, psychologically material or tangible, while blue suggests at most the sea and sky, and they, after all, are in actual, visible nature what is most abstract.’
‘My monochrome pictures are not my definite works, but the preparation for my works. They are the leftovers from the creative processes, the ashes. My pictures, after all, are only the title-deeds to my property which I have to produce when I am asked to prove that I am a proprietor.’
Yves Klein, 1928-1962: Selected Writings, Tate Gallery, London 1974.
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