Poems to the Sea
The offing,
a sounding,
and mapping.
[1] For Agnes Martin, grids represented innocence. She once proclaimed, "Art is the concrete representation of our most subtle feelings.”
[10] Rosalind Krauss wrote “the grid announces, among other things, modern art's will to silence, its hostility to literature, to narrative, to discourse.” Any cartoonist who hears this must protest; the grid makes our stories possible. She continues, “the grid serves not only as emblem but also as myth. For like all myths, it deals with paradox or contradiction not by dissolving the paradox or resolving the contradiction, but by covering them over so that they seem (but only seem) to go away. The grid's mythic power is that it makes us able to think we are dealing with materialism (or sometimes science, or logic) while at the same time it provides us with a release into belief (or illusion, or fiction).”
[11] Cy Twombly immersed himself in myth. The first Twombly comic I read was Fifty Days at Iliam—a ten panel retelling of Homer’s epic the size of a large room. However, my favorite comic is his Poems to the Sea which takes form as 24 little drawing/painting hybrids in his signature scrawly style. The panels of his poems are scribbly lists and metered meditations on the ever distant future in thick white paint and ruts of graphite. The only stability in the work is a clear line near the top of each panel, the horizon.
This book is an unofficial sequel to Twombly's Poems to the Sea. This is the sounding and imprecise mapping of what lies between us, the surface, and the void.
[100] Erin Curry is usually a sculptor. Her comics are sculptures too. Her artwork sometimes responds to the re-emergence of the Sublime through digital exploration. Her grids represent longing.
Awarded an Honorable Mention in 2017 Best of American Comics
Pleased to be mentioned by Kimball Anderson in an essay here as well as Robert Boyd’s favorite comics of 2015 here. Thanks you two.
For the curious, my admittedly expansive definition of comics derives some of its intrigue from 73 NOTES ON COMICS Essay by Barthélémy Schwartz. Translated from the French by Andrew White with help from Barthélémy Schwartz published by Comics Workbook Magazine 4.
It is not the specific content of juxtaposed images that defines comics, but the juxtaposition of the images itself. The text/image dialectic is only secondary in comics; a global image composed of juxtaposed local images without text would still be comics.
White mentioned this essay to me at a conference and it has provided me some permission to keep poking at comics from a sculptural, installation, and painterly perspective and even when I’m not making “comics” it’s still serves as an oblique strategy to moving forward.
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- Dec 9, 2021 Court Grids
- Oct 1, 2020 Objects of Care
- Dec 1, 2019 Limonaia
- Nov 15, 2019 Film: Spaces of the Studio
- Oct 1, 2019 LIFE Newsweave
- Sep 1, 2019 Cyma
- Oct 18, 2018 mobilis in mobili
- Oct 18, 2017 Wise Grid
- Apr 19, 2017 Redacted Text(ile)
- Nov 16, 2016 arche.type
- Nov 15, 2016 Saucers for Nakatani
- Oct 18, 2016 Circuits and Sails
- Sep 22, 2016 After Image Collaboration
- Feb 3, 2016 So Far
- Feb 2, 2016 luna sea
- Jan 3, 2016 Poems to the Sea
- Dec 1, 2015 Four Panel Comics
- Dec 13, 2014 maybe we are the door
- Dec 13, 2014 the impossibility of indexicality
- Sep 20, 2014 Intermittent Transmission
- Jun 15, 2014 Static I, II, III
- Apr 19, 2014 Decoding Grief
- Jun 15, 2013 freckle constellation
- May 10, 2013 what I might have said
- May 8, 2013 vessel for the unspoken
- May 1, 2013 News [wherever the wind blows us]
- Apr 20, 2013 writ on silken seas
- Apr 15, 2013 scratching the surface
- Apr 8, 2013 tracks
- Apr 5, 2013 peers through
- Apr 3, 2013 Ambient Air
- Apr 1, 2013 silk comix
- Jan 18, 2013 Spanish Beard
- Jan 1, 2013 Passage
- Nov 9, 2012 Surveying the Landscape
- Oct 13, 2012 found abstract comics
- Sep 1, 2012 Morphosis
- Aug 18, 2012 my words fly up
- Aug 8, 2012 unnamed as yet
- Aug 8, 2012 a more perfect blue
- Aug 1, 2012 Plying Thoughts Collaboration
- May 10, 2012 inkblot kite
- Jan 18, 2012 Nubis
- Aug 8, 2011 Powerlines
- May 10, 2011 traces of spun
- May 8, 2011 tangle sculptures
- Apr 13, 2011 Specimens
- May 8, 2008 Stone Collector
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Erin
Curry
- Feb 24, 2023 New House, New Light