Guido Quien

White paper – What shall I put on it?

Mihovil Rismondo starts from the verses, but does not sketch or illustrate them. He visually translates the experience, mostly from haiku poetry. In doing so, the selected lines move us and leave space to the imagination. (I’m riding a horse/Behind, my shadow/Creeps, chilled.).

The visual aspect of haiku can be motivating for a painter. Moreover, it sometimes offers him a clear instruction: Lawn: green/yellow, white, blue, red sea!

Also, this author prefers conciseness. Vladimir Devidé wrote: In haiku, all life, the whole world, the whole universe is summed up and concentrated in one experience, in one sensation, emotion or perception, which can be anything: the noise of a bird, the sweltering heat of a summer day, a hill in the mist, snow on the roof or on the ground or on bamboo leaves, fallen flower petals…

It is, to put it briefly, a poetised everyday life. All in all, such sources inspire non-literal interpretations. They are created as triptychs, in a series of three sheets, which make one piece.

Browsing through the visions of this poetry reader, we can say that a free but deeply sensed the relationship between the text and the painting is an essential feature of his expression.

These mini triptychs, consecutive representations, are a walk through the echo of words, units of nuanced changes. Three-sheet imaginary landscapes, sensible moves, as slow-motion film footage, echo the event of a distinct atmosphere.

Although emerging from what is written under the pictures, they are sometimes closer to music than to verbal expression.

Rismondo’s harmonic scenes start from haiku. However, he also visualises a Croatian poet, Vladimir Nazor, and his famous poem Cicada (Cvrčak) and its first line: Chirping,/chirping/cicada on the dark spruce tree (I cvrči, / cvrči / cvrčak na čvoru crne smrče).

All three segments of the visual transposition are dominated by intense red with black outlines of trunks and tree tops. The first two are almost identical (so we can hear the repetition: chirping, chirping…) and only on the third, on the trunk that closes the composition, the cicada. At the bottom, blue and white stripes flow (indicating the sea and horizon), underlining the foot of the view and connecting the whole.

Watching this triptych, simple in the form, but intense in sensation, one feels as if hearing the unspoken in the fervent hymn to the sun: As the sun from the sky pours fire and flames on the earth. But that expression of sunny and sonorous midday did not burn the sound of the night’s silence: Glittering moon!/I walked all night/around the lake.

This triptych is dominated by a single, cold colour, night blue. The central picture focuses on the moon’s reflection in the lake, while the left and the right images are characterised by flashes of the lantern. The ridge of the dark mountain is outlined with a bright broken line, thus highlighting the background.

At the same time, through his perseverance he connects (as with Cicada) all three phases of a night walk into one landscape. Before us there is a dreamy night idyll.

In this opus, the examples of saturated colour have their opposites: the ethereal, very simple scenes. There are a lot of whiteness in them, which becomes meaningful by light strokes, or overlapping planes.

This tendency for the minimal is best seen in the middle frame of the verse-created triptych: In the early autumn./White paper./What shall I put on it. White paper on neutral background. Nothing but a pencil in the bottom. We can try and imagine a paintbrush instead of a pencil and then a painter in front of white paper, a challenge that calls for an answer.

There are also works with winding strips, which once are rivers, then a path of faded dreams. Soft bending straps are characteristic of elegant Japanese decoration (favourite during the Secession period), contrasted by geometric landscapes with sharply cut components, on the edge of geometric abstraction. But with this range of properties, the constant should be emphasised.

The morphological changes in this readable art always reveal the same author. Formally, there are a sensible composition, a delicate line and clear spaciousness. A small shift of the phenomenal, some detail, a line, or a clear surface opens the third dimension. Leafing through these trefoils, we will sometimes smile. Their discreet humour is immanent.

For instance, in that joyfulness sprinkled with raindrops, which grew out of spring rain: Spring rain -/On the walk they talk / raincoat and umbrella. Despite the rainy theme, the visual realisation is cheerful. The rhythmic appearance of multi-coloured umbrella circles, from the first to the second and to the third frame, is really playful. They follow each other like the notes of a tune.

Rismondo’s lyrical frames are both experienced and courageous portraying of the poetic starting point. The literature did not burden them, nor made them literary.

Verses are the impetus of visual ideas, and a formative economy, close to the haiku experience, is a guarantee of appropriate accomplishments.

Visual interpretation of haiku poems*:

The visual interpretation is the presentation of the moment the haiku poem was created. Imagined and reported presentation of the poet’s experience.

The visual interpretation of the poem is not a painted explanation of “what the poet felt and wanted to say.” It just “translates” verses into images (real and mental), as, for example, did S. M. Eisenstein** when he created a screenplay for the film (the art of moving images) for the haiku poem by master Yamei.***

S. M. Eisenstein, the analysis of a haiku poem:

time:      "In one single cry,
sound:      the pheasant has swallowed,
space:      the broad field" 

* Visual interpretations of haiku poems are based on their translations in V. Devidé’s book “Japanese Haiku Poetry and its Cultural and Historical Framework”, Sveučilišna naklada Liber, Zagreb, 1976

** Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein, Russian film director, 1898 – 1948

*** Sakai Yamei, Japanese haiku poet, 1662 – 1713

Because of the creation process.

THE PROCESS

From the first reading to the image, through a series of reflections, sketches, giving up and returning, consultations with my wife Lidija, and finally, to the paper: image – collage.

Enjoying the most.

The scissors cut the paper clean, precisely what the thoughts, pens, and felt pens have accurately sketched, hovering freely between dream and reality.

How beautiful the “game of glass beads” is.

And why do I create, in any technique, images based on haiku poems?

THE PURPOSE

Because by making “haiku images” I am completely immersed, I understand and enjoy haiku poems.

By forensic method, the reconstruction of the scene is the moment when the verses are created.

By presenting a possible image of the moment of formation, by reconstructing the event, to give the viewer the opportunity to see the possible image of the formation of feelings, that is, to give the viewer the opportunity to feel the haiku and to experience it personally.

THE LESSON

I hope you will enjoy looking at my haiku images the same way I was enjoying making them and while I’m WATCHING and SEEING them.

“For poetry is the blossom and the fragrance of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, English poet (1772 – 1834).

About haiku*

Haiku is a flower, the most beautiful flower of Japanese poetry; frail, gentle, powerful, dazing.

Haiku is the shepherd’s purse flower, a small flower, blooming by the Bashô’s** hedge. One rarely notices it. But if you look at it carefully incredible beauty of the little big flower is revealed.

Haiku is a short poem. A traditional haiku consists of 17 syllables, in three lines of five, seven and five syllables respectively, while a modern haiku consists of an undefined number of syllables and their arrangements.

Haiku has emerged from Zen, it is imbued with Zen, it is Zen itself, poetic Zen. When writing haiku, the poet rejects anything that distracts attention and focuses on essence, truth, and beauty.
Haiku is a moment of vision and perception, a feeling written in eternity.

Haiku is “unfinished” (and therefore alive). It is a spark that inspires the reader to “finish” the poem, to “become” a poet in order to experience and feel the inexpressible.

Haiku is symbolic poetry and when one reads it explanations of words and symbols can be helpful.

The most excellent haiku poems were written by the great masters Matsuo Bashô (1644 – 1694), Yosa Buson (1716 – 1784) and Kobayashi Issa (1763 – 1827).

Haiku is appreciated both for its poetic and visual aspects. The written haiku is a painting, a work of art, appreciated as much as the poem itself.

* The text is mostly based on the description of haiku poetry in Vladimir Devidé‘s book “Japanese Haiku Poetry and its Cultural and Historical Framework”.

** Matsuo Bashô, Japanese poet and father of haiku poetry (1644 – 1694).

“Beside the hedge,
If you look carefully,
Shepard’s purse blooms!”