Ekphrasis

John Hiscock stands present. His toes are rooted in rock. Standing in the landscape his brushes carve down to touch sacred bones; they cut as deep as iron ploughs in rough fields stirring up songs of Mother Earth. Eyes become visionary clouds circling in the ferment; his deft strokes are as light as owl feathers in a smooth predatory dive.

Imagine an old oak tree standing in front of an easel and you will see John Hiscock. John did not grow up in the landscape, the Canadian Shield grew into John and now the landscape of our rebirth speaks through him. Old fences stand with solid resolve. Ghostly stones pile up in whispering congregations. Lost meaning returns. Mossy skies become a rising Atlantis. Red water converges with a horizon of golden leaves.

As a poet it is an honour to work with John Hiscock. I have known John for many years and have watched his parallel art growing for decades: Our separate sprouts broke earth in search of sun; always we wanted to place my hymns with his stained glass windows. Finally our complimentary leaves have spread with overlapping hue. Spoken light with painted shadow entwines.

Plato describes paintings as objects that stand before us alive; however, when we query these paintings about themselves they mock us with a majestic silence. In contrast; written words, while they seem to speak with intellect, if asked further about what they actually say they just go on and on and on repeating the same old damn thing forever. Ekphrasis is the dialogue created between a poem and a painting. Ek-phrasis “out - speak” is to take the painting outside of itself and to explore its essence: Where the visceral presence of visual art ends, the non-presence of intellectual language begins. Put them together and transmutation happens. Frozen images begin to move. Words unfold wings of multiple meaning.

Jim Larwill bores people to sleep with repetitive eloquence. John Hiscock is a dumb genius. I write poems for John’s paintings and eyes open, they dart back and forth between image and word. Ears perk. Audiences begin to mutter. People break into a conversation. A dialogue is born.

Landscape painters objectify. They look at the world and re-create it as a fixed object in a definable frame. Often they fall in love with colours, they even make love to canvas with brushes. Titillating the flow of form they get excited as they taste experiential drool in their mouths as they strive to paint a transcendence of subjective experience through creation of fetish object. Sometimes they succeed, but often they fail, especially when creation of a beautiful object is the only goal. Once the painting is further targeted by galleries, by no fault of its own, monetary value begins to sink the depth of a painter’s visions. Now marketed as a magical mountain; beauty is turned into a commodity and put into a box; spirituality is sold as a framed forest fetish. Object art is alienated from the heart-beat of the painterly subject; however, incantations of love sung next to a painting is a poet’s prayer calling the People’s spiritual heart back to the surface.

Ekphrasis is as old as cave art. Painting and incantation are born of the same cradle. The Alpha spreads colours on flickering rock as the Old Omega sits in shadow flames howling. The dream pack gathers. Ekphrasis is the Shield of Achilles on the tongue of Homer. It is the Canadian Shield chanting Shamanic vision. Take the finger, fist, and palm of my poems and let them dance you into John’s Hiscock’s expressive world of People’s Art.

-- Jim Larwill

<< Go back