go go ekphrastic powers
Tamed by Tessa Hulls
Last weekend I went to a new friend’s open studio. I had never seen her art before. For me, this is a pivotal point in a friendship–whether or not I enjoy their artwork. Maybe this makes me sounds like an ass, but consider this common dating problem (which is also a friendship problem) from Kelly Bourdet’s incredibly amusing article entitled “Sex Advice from Poets“:
This guy I’ve been dating is a writer and things have really been going well between us. The problem is that he showed me some of his work last week and I didn’t know how to react — it was terrible! I know it’s a huge part of his life, so I lied and said I liked it. Is this a dealbreaker? I can’t lie forever.
David Lehman says, “Yes. Get out while you can. Bad poets have an impossible amount of vanity and a constant need for attention. You can either break up with him and continue to praise his palaver or you can continue to see him and end up saying some really mean things to a decent guy. You will save yourself a lot of anguish by making a clean break now – although this could be said, come to think of it, about relationships with partners who are not poets, too. If you do head for the exits, do not divulge the reason. He’ll expect you to say something like, “It’s not you, dude. It’s me,” so don’t disappoint him twice in the same conversation.”
But I really liked her art. Her studio looked like a storyboard missing transitions, a folktale that I did not know but somehow remembered. The paintings are somewhat whimsical and nostalgic and my mind automatically went to its ekphrastic place, but stayed like a sentence hesitating on the tip of the tongue. As Socrates said to Phaedrus:
“You know Phaedrus, that is the strange thing about writing, which makes it truly correspond to painting. The painter’s products stand before us as though they were alive, but if you question them, they maintain a most majestic silence.”
Which is, according to a recent interview, exactly what the artist intended:
My work deals with the malleability of memory, and the scenes I create are essentially illustrations of forgetting as an anthropomorphic process. I’m fascinated by the way memory becomes corrupted, and how our impressions of the past lose focus and change over time. On a chemical level, the act of recalling a memory actually changes the content of that memory–it’s like listening to an audio file, only where the act of playback actually records over the initial file, leaving you with an end result that is extremely similar to your starting point, but is also fundamentally altered. I find that pretty damn fascinating, particularly because it implies that the best way to preserve a memory in its objective state is to never think about it once it’s happened.
I found the art work pretty compelling and have been thinking of it all week, making strange segments of stories in my head. If you need an ekphrastic exercise, and if you want to check out some 72 dpi versions of her work, visit tessahulls.com, otherwise plan a trip to Seattle.
I guess it would be super-weird to have gone to Tessa’s studio and absolutely hated her art. It’s like, I’ve been friends with this woman for a couple years but I’ve only seen a little of her art.
I’m so glad that I walked into her studio and loved what she does with colors–her reds and browns are particularly gorgeous–and had the immediate desire to give her hundreds and hundreds of dollars that I don’t really have in order to buy beautiful original paintings from her.
So cool.