Visual artists’ knack for alternating imaginative writing with the medium for which they are otherwise known has occurred with such frequency throughout history that the observation tilts nowadays toward a mere truism. Not long ago Donald Friedman traced this usual yet stealthy swap from the other way around in a book entitled The Writer’s Brush. His overarching revelation speaks bundles about the aged wedlock between letters and art.
Explorations in literature as an outlet to imaginative surplus are indeed commonplace among many visual artists. Salvador Dalí thought of himself better at writing than painting. Picasso’s poetic imagery often fleshed afterward on his canvases. Modigliani not only wrote poems, but he earned a standing as a café authority on the subject among his surrealist acquaintances. The poetry of Michelangelo, William Black, Kandinsky, Frida Khalo, and scores of others active today merit serious critical attention.
As is Painting, so is Poetry
Case in point: Horace’s classical precept garners a plausible conveyor with the work of Dina Mack, from McRae Art Studios in Winter Park, Florida. By conflating both fields of expression, the most remarkable feat of her talent unfolds as an exponential marvel whereby the almost fainting sobriety from which she typically departs also woos the spirit into endless ramifications in plastic and lyric relevance.
From the outwardly inert, unnoticeable, simple, Dina Mack’s acute sensibility spurs compelling relationships. “To me,” she says, “a whisper is powerful. I’m influenced by experiences that are quiet, personal, fragile, and beautifully imperfect.”
Her art is holistic by temperament, and as such, it seizes all the senses, smell and touch especially. She likewise desecrates in this manner the chief notion of time by reverting instead to a rootage that transcends her own existence. In her poem “The Pause”, the subject dissipates into a connective wholeness by also negating itself:
“In the spaces occupying / quick glances / and hurried grace, / my comfort is within. / The pause. / Extending / within / the warm / breath, / my voice / that is yours. / You can’t see me. / I’m no longer / part of this world.”
“…and the Floating White”
“There are no successful marriages in art—only successful rape.” So asserted Susanne Langer in Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art (1953) as she described the steep aesthetic infringement the artist must commit before bearing any meaningful outgrowth. In the aftermath, Dina Mack has ingratiated the genres to the extent where anything arcane hardly feels as an aimless discord. Even her passions become contented alliterations: “plants, poems, painting, paper, pins, perfume.”
Notwithstanding the range of her objects, her use of paper in its common color and textural evocation synthesizes best the linkage between the visual artist and the poet. For both, the “blank space” lends a point of departure toward the fulfillment of new encounter or the recovery of a painful loss. Dina Mack’s poem, “The White”, exploits with poignant brevity this utter and at times overwhelming plainness:
“Twenty-four Junes / birth / the love, / and the death. / Lush and the grit / still / surrounded by wet / light. / Still / the white / floating / and the floating white.”
As a combined offshoot from her mixed media collages, paintings and installations, Dina Mack’s text / visual journaling reinforces further this crossbreeding between visual art and poetry. Here too the bridging nuances, as precious secrets, rip onto a whisper, gentle and at once forceful in its expansive meanings. Visual artist and poet, her work resumes as a “perpetual series” from which the warm breath of her voice pauses and remains in a better world.
Dina Mack’s Upcoming Exhibits in Central Florida
McRae Art Studios’ Holiday Open House, on December 4, 2010.
In the White, featuring as joint artist, at the Lake Eustis Museum of Art. Opening on April 8, 2011.
Egberto Almenas - Egberto Almenas is a literary and art scholar, author of four books of essays and a frequent contributor in both Spanish and English ...
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