contours of the natural surface
Apropos of tracing the edges of cuts in leaves, I came across the following description of Clarice Lispector’s painting in Why This World, chapter 42 “The Thing Itself:”
(quoting Clarice)”…profundity is not the only thing that exists. The surface is a real aspect.”
Just how much she understood of the surface as “a real aspect” is most immediately visible in her paintings. Her technique is the opposite of the trompe l’oeil. By allowing herself to follow the grain of the wood she painted over, she covers the surface at the same time that she calls attention to its reality, and thus to the artificiality of her own creation. She is not trying to make a piece of canvas look like wood or marble. She is not creating a fake surface but, by following the contours suggested by a natural surface, making that natural surface reveal its depths. The tension between the “natural” and the “invented,” between the “real aspect” of the surface and the profundity of human artifice, is the source of the paintings’ disquieting power.
Why This World, Benjamin Moser, page 357
I might be trying to force what I love about Clarice Lispector’s writing into ecopoetry. I’m not sure yet. Her writing is “anthropoetry.” “Homopoetry?” Some word that hasn’t been invented yet, meaning the human in poetry.