Name: Un fiore rosso - A Red Flower
Uploaded: 2019-05-14T19:31:47.000Z
Duration: 24 min 17 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Some time ago I met a friend from high school.

His name is Marco.  He made me a gift, a book of poems  written by his uncle Franco

whose title is  \"Come passa il vento fra i rami\"  [\"The way wind blows through the branches\"].

He also asked me to make a painting on one or more of his uncle's poems and told me I was completely free to decide among them.

And yes, I forgot to say that he also  convinced me to make a video on the making of the painting.

As a student at the Academy of fine arts  I studied art and painting and I also focused  on the subject of \"poetry\" and \"prose\",

on what is our concept of poetry and prose  and how can painting speak about them.

Octavio Paz, a great poet, used to say that poetry is  such when each word keeps more meanings,

all the meanings that such word can have.

A poet is actually able to free all the evocative strength of words,

whereas in prose or in narrative each word has to keep a univocal meaning,

the exact meaning that an author needs to go on with his story.

In prose all words have to obey to one meaning,

while in poetry words are free and such freedom of meaning  is the heart of poetry.

The same thing applies to painting:  colours and shapes can be used like words are used.

I don't want to keep more on  this subject,  so I come to my conclusions: as a painter, I definetly consider myself a prosaic painter.

Just to give you an idea: if I was a writer,  I would write novels, and not poems,

where words can merrily flutter here and there  and say one thing and then another one.

I would use words like slaves who have to carry a stone  and to place it in the right place to build the great pyramid of narration.

So I didn't know how to behave in front of my friend's request:  I wanted to connect the painting to the world of poetry, where words are free,

but as I said I don't like to give such freedom to shapes and colours,  that are the words in painting.

I rather like to give them a precise descriptive rationality, to describe things as they are,

Well...then I started reading the book looking for a poem  that might be source of inspiration for a painting

a sparkle in your eyes / like wood dew under / the first sun

I live / but this is not the life / I want to live

and buildings are cubes / and streetlights are candles /  people's coffins

a white point in a black background / It may seem a small thing / but it's the whole world

And then, I came across a drawing among those that go with the poems.

This drawing refers to the poem \"Loosen your hair\"

and  it cought my attention while I was still thinking  about the relationship between poetry and prose.

In this  drawing, made by the author Franco Rossi, a line traces a girl's face

while other lines move all around and trace her hair  forming a wild mass.

I believe that this drawing unifies in a single image what I intend for prose and poetry,

The line of the face is precise, has a road to trace and cannot vary,  if not a little bit, otherwise it would lose its meaning:

Can you see it is a slave? It is subdued in any single curve to its inevitable course. Nose, mouth, chin...

On the other hand, the lines of the hair are poetry, free words...

They also have a meaning, each line is a hair,  but they can be drawn so freely!

They can go anywhere, bend and curve as they like, any single hair cannot be more hair than the other.

Differently from the girl's profile, the beauty of the hair  is not in the precision of the shape,

but in the richness of signs,  in... in the joy of the drawing itself,

that encloses  the author's emotions and refers to the poem  that was source of its inspiration: \"Loosen your hair\".

The great french poet Paul Valery used to say that  prose marches, and poetry dances

And then, can you see? The lines of the hair are so free  that some of them start like hair

and then go on into the background losing  their small precise meaning

until they become completely abstract lines and pure drawing, almost decoration.

To distinguish them from the hair  is almost impossible.

Within such crazy freedom of the hair lines, we need  one single prosaic line to give meaning to the whole drawing:

if we deleted such line that traces the profile  and gives meaning to the drawing, what would remain?

Who would tell us that those entangled lines are hair?

We feel enchanted but also puzzled by such whirl of signs.

Therefore that single line is like  the meaning's sheet anchor in the sea of craziness.

Yes, I like the idea of relationship between poetry and prose that the drawing suggests to me,

and the subject of hair will be my support and my anchor when I lean out of the world of prose and rationality

to step on the world of poetry and craziness.

I would say that for a prosaic painter hair can be like  a Sunday journey, an exception to the rule, the Carnival,

when nature in her own realism abandons her strictness  and relax for a while.

During the days I was considering such ideas,  I discovered that they were not totally original.

At the end of the 19th century the German historian and art critic  Aby Warburg  wrote an essay on Botticelli's masterpiece The Birth of Venus.

He believed that even during Renaissance, a period in which the  rationality of closed and precise shape, \"the Apollonian figure\",

and I could say the \"prosaic figure\" dominated the field of painting  and figurative arts,

it was often through objects moved by the wind,  usually hair or draping,

that the artist set himself free from the stylistic yoke  and dedicated himself to images free from rationality.

Thanks to their movement the artist could be closer to emotions, feelings, and also mystery and anxiety,

to what Warburg calls -- referring to the painting -- intensified life or feeling formula, the Dionysiac moment of images,

that I could also call the \"moment of poetry\".

The shapes of the goddess of beauty are closed in dark  and very marked lines, typical of Botticelli,

and outline the body with surgical precision.

It's in the goddess' hair that such formal rules start to break,  and even if in some parts hair are tied up with ribbons,

they are too many to be tamed.  The wind blows and free them from any constraint.

So hair can be painted like loosen and free lines  that do not obey to strict rules

and in these movements the painter's brush finally finds its moment of anarchy.

I will base my work on the drawing that goes with the poem \"Loosen your hair\" and I will make a personal version,

where the hair will be the centre of the painting  since they are the place where poetry ca be painted within a context that will inevitably be prosaic,

and I say inevitably because - if it is still not clear--  I like reality and I like painting it as it is,

And yet the poem \"Loosen your hair\" does not totally convince me.

I can't see a definite painting image in it...

I can see it instead in the following poem, called \"A red flower\".

So I decide to use the poem \"A red flower\" as my base for the image  by insisting on the element of loosen hair,

Those few verses describe a person, recalled from far memories,  who has a red flower in her dark hair,

a smiling face,  in the bloom of youth, with an avid mouth,  a life like music of sea waves...

Now, the image I want to paint is clear: a whole figure,  walking on the surface of the water and coming towards myself,

she is smiling, she has long loose hair decorated  by a red flower.

but maybe I'd better give up the self-portrait this time.

Now I need to chose and eventually elaborate  the image that will be painted...

I took a lot of pictures of Giulia, my friend that kindly accepted to be my model,