Author: Natalie Burkardt

After the big jumble of text and image in “Asterios Polyp”, I found the organized layout and simple images of Tan’s “The Arrival” very refreshing. I loved the highly detailed and emotional illustrations. They were so intricate that the book really didn’t need words, and perhaps would not have the same sort of emotional impact if there were words to go along with those images.

Something about the illustration style reminded me of the illustrations in “The Polar Express” by Chris Van Allsburg. While “The Polar Express” still has words to go with the images, the careful composition and emotional impact of the illustrations were what really drew me to the book as a child. I wonder how “The Polar Express” would read if you only looked at the images and ignored the text.

It was also really interesting to watch Tan’s “The Lost Thing” in class. I enjoyed hearing the story rather than reading it while viewing the animation. However, I wonder how it would have worked with just the sound effects and no narration, sort of like “Walle” the movie. I enjoyed watching/hearing/reading/viewing all these different works, and am left curious about how the artist decides how their illustrations will interact with text.

Asterios Polyp, like most of the other texts we’ve read this semester, is difficult to categorize. I’m not sure that is is completely fair to say that you “read” Asterios Polyp, since so much of the story is visual and contained within the illustrations.

The experience of reading/viewing Asterios Polyp was very different than anything else I’ve read. The images and texts are completely entangled, which means your eyes are constantly shifting between looking at the illustrations and reading the text bubbles. I enjoyed this for the first few chapters, but after awhile my eyes got tired and I was sick of looking all over the page to get everything out of the story. When we got the 3D glasses in class, it only made matters worse. Though I do think it is a cool idea, I don’t think the 3D was very effective, and it only made it more difficult to read the story.

While the unconventional set up of Asterios Polyp began to annoy me after a while, I don’t think the book would have worked as well in a more traditional set up, and I think reading/viewing it was a rewarding experience.

I think that all the workshops we’ve had for class have been rewarding and increased my understanding of the texts we’ve read, but the collage workshop on Monday may have been the most enjoyable. I wasn’t excited about making a collage initially. I didn’t feel like dealing with scissors or messy glue sticks, and had no idea/plan for what I wanted to make. But once we got going, I found myself embracing the mess and being much more creative than I anticipated.

The wonderfully cheesy poetry magazines that the library supplied were actually perfect for collage, with lots of animals and people in different scenarios. Thinking back to Ernst, I started to combine the people and animals, and see how seamless I could make it look. My final product was pretty weird, but I had a lot of fun making it, and laughed the whole time as I was cutting the heads off of men in a fishing boat and replacing them with the heads of cats.

I was much more creative in the collage workshop than in the digital workshop, and I think a big reason for that was because for the collage workshop we literally had something to work with. It was daunting to sit in front of a computer where you can create whatever you want and just come up with something. The materials of the collage inspired me and gave me direction. Maybe Ernst chose to do collage instead of drawing because the materials allowed him to be more creative.

Overall, I found Amphigorey to be one of the most interesting and humorous works we’ve looked at all semester. I really like his intricate drawing style, the setup of the little illustrations with short bits of text, and the space between each scene.

I also like the dark sense of humor… to a point. Gorey’s distaste for children is made abundantly clear in a lot of the stories, particularly “The Gashlycrumb Tinies” and “The Bug Book”. “The Bug Book” is relatively harmless and inoffensive, but “Gashlycrumb Tinies”, which is about children dying in many different, gruesome ways, has probably upset a lot of people. I still find these humorous, because they are so over the top.

The story that really bothered me was “The Curious Sofa”. While reading the story, I found it odd and a little disconcerting that the story was so blatantly about sex while the illustration and presentation were so similar to children’s books. I know that it was supposed to be weird and unsettling, but the end was so creepy that it put me over the edge, and I found that there was no pay-off to the creepiness. I can’t stop thinking about the last line: “When Alice saw what was about to happen, she began to scream uncontrollably…” I think this is probably exactly the reaction Gorey wanted from his readers. I feel as though I’m missing the joke! Does anyone else feel the same about this story/care to explain the humor to me?

While reading/looking at Ernst’s collages in Un Semain De Bonte, I had a hard time believing that the images were actually collage, and not just one drawing. I am really curious about Ernst’s creative process. How did he find images that went together so well? How did he make them fit together so seamlessly? Un Semain De Bonte is so unlike any other collages I’ve seen in that it does not appear to be collage at all. If Ernst’s goal was to make his collages not look like collages, why didn’t he just draw them in the first place?

Another thing that interested me was the socio-political commentary Ernst inserted into his collages. In combining different parts of images to make something entirely new, Ernst distorted common scenes of life and gave them weird and unsettling meaning. This idea of collage as way of making commentary is still present today. For example, the artist/rapper Yung Jake who creates intricate celebrity portraits entirely out of emojis.

Another example is the popular tv show South Park, which in its first few seasons was animated through a type of collage called stop motion cutout animation. South Park, like Un Semain De Bonte, is chalk-full of all type of commentary on today’s society. I am curious about what the deeper connection between collage and socio-political commentary is.

It was really nice to have such a fun class this Wednesday amid all the midterm craziness. After being stuck in the library all week, Dunham basement was a nice change of pace, which is something I never thought I would say. Learning how to use the printing presses and set up a galley was a lot more intense that I thought it would be, and I was a little nervous about using such a complex machine by myself. Professor Rippeon was able to explain it all very simply though. It was fun to look around the room and see what everyone else was printing. Just like with the scriptorium, I was impressed by the creativity of everyone in the class. I am excited to see everyone’s finished projects when we come back from break.

I really enjoyed Wednesday’s visit from Janelle Schwartz. Though I found Blake’s Songs of Experience interesting while reading them myself before class, I definitely got a lot more out of our in class discussion. I liked that we chose to focus on one poem rather than talking about the book as a whole. When I read The Sick Rose before class, I definitely did not pay enough attention to or even notice at all the innuendos or all that was going on in the illustration. It was interesting to see what different things everyone in class noticed that I did not.

I thought it was interesting that Janelle mentioned she hates when Blake’s poems are taught as just text without the illustrations rather than as prints. I’ve had to read Blake’s poems in class many times (especially The Tyger), but always just as text. I didn’t even know that the poems had illustrations until reading Songs of Experience for this class. Seeing the poems as prints definitely changes the experience of reading for me. After going through The Sick Rose in class, I’d definitely agree with Janelle that the poems should always be presented with their illustrations. The illustrations add a lot to reader’s interpretations of the poem, as Janelle’s presentation pointed out. It was curious to me that the prints often use different colors for the same image, like how the image of The Sick Rose that was projected for the class was very different than the image in our book. I wonder how the different coloring affects the act of reading and interpreting the image.

Goya’s Los Caprichos is probably my favorite text we’ve looked at in class thus far. It is such an interesting juxtaposition of words and images, and so different than all the other manuscripts we’ve looked at. Los Caprichos was created solely for the viewer’s entertainment, rather than for religious reasons, like a book of hours. While viewing the images and their captions, I found that the humor Goya intended them to have still worked. I’m always interested in watching old comedies to see if their humor still holds today. I find that most things lose their humor with the passage of time, and few are able to make viewers laugh many years into the future. I think that Los Caprichos still works today because it pokes fun at universal themes like relationships between men and women and between the rich and the poor.

It was also fun to look at a different type of illustration. I really enjoyed watching the video about printmaking, which is not something I was very familiar with prior to class. It made me appreciate Los Caprichos even more. Though they seem a little simplified and gestural, those etchings were made in a complex, laborious process.

I’ll be honest- I usually have a little trouble keeping my eyes open during the first few minutes of class at 8:30am on Mondays and Wednesdays. It isn’t because I’m not interested, I am just not operating on all cylinders quite yet.

However, this Wednesday was totally different. We had such a nice and relaxed set up, with food and paints and even music. I started planning out my letter, and was soon totally absorbed in the activity. I don’t think I looked up from my project once during class. I got in a real rhythm while retracing my lines and listening to the Gregorian chants. I found myself wishing we had more time to finish the letters when class was over. I left class feeling totally energized and ready for the rest of the day.

I think our little scriptorium was therapeutic in that it made me slow down and realize that having time to something like draw and paint is really relaxing. It also made me appreciate even more the historated letters we’ve been looking at in class. The detail and concentration that they require is truly impressive. Looking around at all the letters we made in class, I was struck by how differently each person addressed the assignment. I am really excited to see what everyone does for the larger assignment. Maybe we should have a scriptorium every Wednesday???

The ekphrasis exercise we did in class on Wednesday was pretty simple: describe one of two illuminated pages from the book of hours so that someone who has never seen it could have an idea of what it looks like. However, I found myself sitting there not knowing how to begin. Initially I blamed it on the 8:30 class time and the coffee depravation. I tried to scribble down a few sentences about the general layout of the page, and soon realized it was a failed attempt. When other people in the class read their sentences aloud, I was impressed and thought they did a pretty good job considering the short amount of time we had to do the exercise. I continued thinking about that exercise throughout the day, and realized that completely explaining an image or picture in words is impossible.

People have written many books and essays on different works of art, but I don’t think any written representation is able to entirely capture what a piece of art does. There are infinitely many things to say about any one piece; infinitely many descriptions, comparisons, conclusions. Imagine trying to write down everything that happens in any movie in complete detail. Or, if you’ve ever seen a really famous painting in person, remember how seeing the physical object in front of you was so different than reading about it in art history books.

I think the same can be said for trying to make an image out of text. People always complain about movies that are based on books, saying that “they missed the whole part about _”, or “that character looks nothing like their description in the book!” Trying to make a movie out of My Name is Red that is accurate down to the very last detail would be a real pain in the butt, as we all can imagine after reading the book.

Though I believe all ekphrasis (and its opposite) is just paraphrasing, I do think it is valuable. The in-class exercise made us all realize how difficult the process really is, and how much information can get lost in the transition from image to text, or vice versa.