LOTLab. Painting Poetry: Between Word and Image

Painting Poetry: Between Word and Image is an experimental painting workshop exploring what happens to language when it moves beyond the written page and enters a visual composition. Words give abstract thoughts and feelings concrete form but what happens when we see them through the prism of color, gesture, and composition? Just as poetry can move beyond the literal meaning of words through rhythm, association, repetition and ambiguity, painting gives language another way to speak. We begin with a word or short piece of text that holds meaning for us and place it directly onto the working surface. From there, we respond through paint—not by illustrating the words, but by following the colors, gestures, and associations they provoke. As our paintings develop, we stop and look again. Words may be preserved, repeated, obscured, transformed or painted over entirely as language and image begin to affect one another. By moving between…