Anna Bloom returns

I think it was in 2014 I did my own translation of Kurt Schwitters' poem Anna Blume. I posted about it on the Policy Police blog because that was the locus of my arty stuff back then. I also thought that I should do some illustrations, and had a go at some drypoints, but they didn't really work out. So the project has been lurking among the fluff in my back pocket since then.

It's Open Studios time again and I was looking for something to do, so I decided to revisit it. I can't remember how much I may have tweaked the poem, do here's the text again:

ANNA BLOOM Kurt Schwitters

O you, beloved of my twenty-seven senses, I love you! - Thee thy thou you, I you, you me. - We?

This doesn't belong here (by the way).

Who are you undocumented damsel? You are - - are you? People say, you would - - let them talk, they don't know how the church tower stands.

You wear your hat on your feet and walk on your hands, on your hands you walk.

O, your red dress, sawn with white pleats.

I love Anna Bloom red, I love you red! - Thee thy thou you, I you, you me. - We?

This belongs in the cold embers (by the way).

Red bloom, red Anna Bloom, how can people talk so?

Prize question: 

1. Anna Bloom has a bird.
2. Anna Bloom is red.
3. What colour is the bird?

Blue is the colour of your yellow hair.

Red is the cooing of your green bird.

You simple girl in everyday clothes, you dear green creature, I love you! - Thee thy thou you, I you, you me. - We?

This belongs in the ashcan (by the way).

Anna Bloom! Anna, a-n-n-a, I trickle your name. Your name drips like soft tallow.

Do you know, Anna, do you know yet?

One can read you from behind, and you, you fairest of them all, you are from behind as you are from the front: “a-n-n-a”.

Tallow trickles caressingly over my back.

Anna Bloom, you dripping creature, I love you!

I'm still quite pleased with the translation - it seems to have survived nine years in my pocket so seems worth trying. We've just had the first 4 days of Open Studios and I've got a couple of prints done, but I've been too knackered to post about them here, so they all come in a bunch, like buses.

PS 10th July 2023. Just revised my translation again. I substitute the word creature for animal. It seems to fit better with the love thing. It was brought to mind by my very occasional remembering of the song, "No, John, No". "On yonder hill there stands a creature..."

PPS 31 July. Finally replaced "clothes" with "dress" - there is enough of an implication of clothes in dress. And dress makes more sense vis-a-vis pleats. I think so anyway.

Anna Bloom: Prize question

"Prize question: 

1. Anna Bloom has a bird.
2. Anna Bloom is red.
3. What colour is the bird? "

This sits pretty much in the middle of the poem. And around about when our poet starts to really fall apart. His obsession is starting to get the better of him.

I thought of making this a silhouette so that I wouldn't be giving too much away. As you might guess, the answer contains colour, so let's keep this black and white. In the end I decided that the bird wouldn't be a shadowy silhouette. It gives a little detail in the middle and helps differentiate the bird from Anna's hand.

Red bloom, red Anna Bloom...

 

I had mostly cut this last weekend, so it waited all week to be printed.

This line is the reason I translated Anna's surname. The pun is there in the original German, so it needed to be included. Puns are things loved by oh-so-clever young men. It gives you the illusion that you can see things others are just too ignorant to spot. A subtle precursor to the logically faulty Prize Question.

I felt the bloom ought to be a rose. The flower of love and all that. The rose here is taken from my original drawing, but back in 2014 I had imagined Anna from the front, her eyes closed and her nose/mouth obscured by the rose. I like this better. I think it emphasises that Anna isn't party to our poet's fantasy.

Coming just before the pivotal Prize Question, it's the last of the red pictures. Before everything turns green.

Anna Bloom: Beloved of my 27 senses

 "O you, beloved of my twenty-seven senses, I love you!" This is the opening line of the poem, so it's our first sight of the unsuspecting Anna. Over the years I've had lots of thoughts about how to approach this one. Fairly early on, I thought he'd see her when she's out and about shopping. At the market, maybe. The last few days this developed into her eating an apple, so the poor deluded fool can think of her as tempting him.

You only have the poet's word for it, but there is something unconvenional about Anna Bloom. It seems she is gossiped about at the least. Eating in public can do that. Believe me.

Anna Bloom: This belongs in the ashcan

 Another print for Anna Bloom. The poem contains three of these little refrains, "This belongs...(by the way)" where the poet wishes to carry out brutal edits at the very least, or even dispose of the poem altogether. This one I decided to go with a dustbin with a touch of Top Cat about it. For after all, the whole poem is quite comical in its doomed quest.

Coming Soon! Anna Bloom in book form

 I decided to get this printed in advance of the Rugby Book Festival comng up on October 19th. I've put Anna Bloom together with Trigger Warning: Dance of Death and The Hand book into a slim volume that I will attempt to sell at the Alex. The box containing the first 25 should be here on the 16th. In the meantime here's the flipbook version.

More colour for Anna Bloom

 Did another three today. I think I've finished the red and I've done the one and only blue. Though on the red front I need to try out the "I live Anna Bloom red" in black and red to see if it works, despite having cut it already. I think the red works nicely in these two. I think the blue is OK, thouh maybe could do with a bit more extending.

I love Anna Bloom red!

 This is the first of the Anna Bloom illustrations. I may tweak it some more, maybe losing the pink background. 

Here we have our tortured lovesick loon desperately caressing his blanket. The drawing "came out of my head," and I even spent time lying in bed trying to imagine what I looked like from the ceiling. But when I was cutting it, Eric Gaskell came and looked over my shoulder and said, "That expressionist painter, that painting..." and I knew instaintly he meant Kokoshka's Bride of the Wind. It's not the same design, but it has the same desperate vibe.

Later on I realised there is something of the Annie Liebovitz photo of John Lennon and Yoko Ono about it, too. Funny how these things are filed away in your head.

Anna Bloom: Tallow trickles caressingly over my back

 This is the 18th and last picture for Anna Bloom. It is number 17 in the series, the penultimate line of the poem. It is about pain. It is about the pain of his unrequited love. But also the pain that is preferable to doing something about it. The pain of being a martyr to his own passion. A kind of grandstanding, I feel.

I definitely need to go back through these and make colour blocks for about 12 of the 18 prints. Red in the first half, pivoting through the single blue and turning green in the second half.

It has been a very interesting process. Going through the poem line-by-line, searching for some cue for my visual interpretation. Schwitters was one of those artists seeking to create a Gesamtkunstwerk - a total work of art - so everything links together for him, visual, auditory, tactile. Maybe he sought to appeal to the "twenty-seven senses" in his art.

I've also got to think now about producing this in book form. Both an "art" book and a "book" book. We shall see how this progresses.

Adding colour to Anna Bloom

 As I wasn't feeling especially creative today, I made a start to colouring some of the Anna Bloom illustrations. As I wanted to achieve a reasonably close registration, I used the method of offsetting a print off the original block on to the new one. 

 

I'm pretty happy with these two. I think the "red dress sawn with white pleats" does give the effect I wanted.

Who are you, undocumented damsel? (Anna Bloom)

 This is the second of the Anna Bloom illustrations. I had done a simple outline drawing way back when I had the original idea. I've just taken that and made it more blocky. I always liked the simplicity of this one, and the slightly threatening vibe, implying the slightly stalkerish feeling I get from the poem.

Finishing the colour blocks for Anna Bloom

 I managed to get the remaining blocks cut and printed this weekend. I used a sludgy grey-green that was mostly mixed up leftovers. But I actually quite like it. I might do a proper run of the whole lot so that they're as good as they can be, so I'm going to have to intentionally mix a green like this. Scary.

I love how the passion changes in the second half. And that posessive element takes over. Green, the colour of envy does seem appropriate - he becomes jealous of every aspect of her life...

I also did the "I love Anna Bloom red!" with just the red blanket so that it now fits with the overall vibe.

Anna Bloom: from behind... from the front

The one where our man gets excited that Anna is a palindrome.

"Do you know, Anna, do you know yet?
One can read you from behind, and you, you fairest of them all, you are from behind as you are from the front: “a-n-n-a”."

I felt that the poem definitely hits the bottom of the pit of creepiness here. This takes the "simple girl in everyday clothes" and turns her into a child. I definitely got a slight Rolf Harris vibe in translating that I at least hint at here.  

In the picture I see him utterly worn out by his obsession. Looking at her name in a mirror. I think when it comes to colour, I'll shade the bits outside the mirror in green...

Anna Bloom: Simple girl

 "You simple girl in everyday clothes, you dear green creature, I love you!" Now this is a strange thing to say. Up to this point in the poem Anna has been quite unconventional. She is acrobatic, wears loud clothes, is gossiped about. Suddenly she is a simple girl in everyday clothes. 

Have I mentioned this before? I once knew a guy who had a crush on a 6ft lesbian. He used cute diminutives in refering to her, even though she could probably take him down with one hand tied behind her back. But it was his way of giving his doomed pash even the remotest possibility of a future. So if she's a simple girl, she's in his league.

So that's why I've given Anna a more sophisticated vibe here. Just to strike a discordant note with the statement. Also she's wearing a military style coat to make her green...

Anna Bloom: I trickle your name...

 Here he is, alone, playing games with her name. "a-n-n-a" he says. His fantasy seems to be moving away from the real, flesh-and-blood girl, and becoming focused on her name.

Tallow was a poor man's candle. It didn't last long, and it smelled. Along with the cold embers, this is a clue that our man hasn't got much by way of material resources. Perhaps he doesn't have much to offer. Maybe she's really way out of his league.

Anna Bloom: you dripping creature!

 This is the last line of the poem. There he is in the previous line, burning himself with candle wax while here she goes about her daily life oblivious to his infatuation.

Plenty of guys are like Macbeth's proverbial cat, "letting I dare not wait upon I would" in matters of romance. Our protagonist is just like this. The pain of hot wax seems preferable to him, rather than face the possiblity of rejection.

Anna, we know will be all right. Somebody will dare to ask her out. Likely sombody with fewer "issues".

Salon des Refuses

 For the month of December at the Alex. Work of local artists that have been rejected bu juried shows some time in the last couple years. It coincides with this year's Rugby Open which I failed to be selected for (sob). But really this looks at least as good on your CV. My works showing at the SdR are Kind of Blue, plus the piece shown above with 5 panels from Anna Bloom entitled, "Story without words".

Sensing

This print brings together a number of ideas that arose while I was working on other projects. Some I have already used; others I just slipped into my pocket with my car keys. They all came tumbling out when someone suggested Five Senses for the name of the upcoming Rugby Artists and Makers exhibition. So here they are brought together in a sensual game of consequences.

So many artists and ideas came into play here. Touch comes from Harold Speed’s book, The Practice and Science of Drawing – the notion that outline comes from the act of touching – it’s an idea I’ve wanted to draw for some time, and it sneaks in here. The hearing woman is based on a figure from an old life drawing by an unknown artist. The whispering man and the seeing woman started out as the couple in Nolde’s Mann und junges Madchen. The sensuous pomegranate eater has been in my pocket since I did the Song of Solomon prints, and if I ever do a full set of those he will reappear. The model for the pomegranate eater is by the way a small classical bust of Hermes I keep for these purposes. The woman smelling the flower is of course Anna Bloom, pretty much directly lifted from my Rote Blume print. Finally the pregnant belly with the eye comes from Shiko Munakata. The navel eye appears frequently in his work; I’m guessing it’s Bhuddist, but For me it feeds sufficiently into that Room for a Life thing and maybe that Gut Feeling thing to place the viewer in a slightly uncomfortable place.

Finally, I recently bought a print by Maria Beine-Hager of a puppeteer and puppets that was done as simple line work in white on black. So provided the overall feel of what I wanted to do. As I was working on this I was reminded of an article by Eric Gill in the Woodcut Annual for 1927. He suggested that it was relatively simple to make intaglio prints from small wood engraving blocks. I am minded to try making intaglio prints from this block. If it works out I will no doubt post again.

Anna Bloom: Cold embers

 

"This belongs in the cold embers (by the way)." The last of the "editorial" comments. Well the last from me, it's the middle one of the three in the poem. I imagined Schwitters, after having stayed up all night writing, throwing his manuscript into the fire which has long since gone out. This is based on one of the first drawings I did for this project, way back in 2014. I still like it. It's the kind of open fire I remember us having when I was a kid.

Anna Bloom: Blue is the colour of your yellow hair

 It's not such an unusual observation these days, is it? Anyway. Her hair is blue because she dyes it.

I'm a little disappointed with some of the drawing, but not enough to re-do the whole thing. I might try a little tweak here and there,,, or maybe not.