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Monday, March 14, 2005
Cuizon: The woman in painting and poetry
By Erma Cuizon
Bird by Bird
FOR Women’s Month, there’s something different in town and of the town (not “imported” from Manila) — an exhibit by women in poetry and art. You might say it’s the first of its kind. There’s an interpretation of poetry in a painting and of painting in poetry.
But painting poetry isn’t new. There has always been a connection. The painter reads a poem and enters the poet’s world, then puts the message in his own art in his own way.
Back in the time of Greek lyric poet Simonides, paintings inspired poetry, it was “silent poetry.” Simonides was the first one to acknowledge the connection.
Chinese ancient poet-painter, Wang Wei, is said to have in his “poetry (there is) painting and in his painting (there is) poetry.” Later, Roman lyric poet Horace said, “As is painting, so is poetry.” Michaelangelo was the first painter-poet in the tradition of Europe when he started writing sonnets at age 60.
But you don’t have to go back so far in time or get out of Cebu to see the result of a connection between poetry and painting, the poet and the painter. There’s an on-going exhibit for Women’s Month sponsored by the NCCA, the Women in Literary Arts, Inc. (WILA), in partnership with women painters in Cebu who are about to organize into one group.
But such a project has to begin with a formal group of women’s organization – either the women writers or the women painters. In this case, WILA is the only women’s literary group in the country (over a dozen years old) while the women painter’s group is also starting to organize as Women Artists Initiatives (WAI). So it can happen only in Cebu.
The exhibit called “Babayeng Buhat” at the Ayala Entertainment Center is a coming together of painting and poetry –not just the poem but the poet, touching base with not just the painting but the painter, on the subject of women.
The women artists and the WILA writers paired off and connected even before any painting was started or any poem was written. The painters in their gentleness, the poets as gentle with their literary voice.
With WILA and WAI as the only women artists and writers organized, we should have something new in this side of the world. There are many faces of the woman in a painting or a poem, but predominantly, as the patient mother and enduring wife. She doesn’t leave home in the middle of uncertainty, she lasts. And in this way, she prevails.
So how do you put even this single facet of the woman in meters and rhyme? And how do you create her in color and undulating surfaces?
Find out and watch the exhibit until March 18 in Ayala, then in Robinson’s, March 21-31.
(emc(at)sunstar(dot)com(dot)ph)
(March 14, 2005 issue)
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