The Work

Art / Nazifa Islam

 

:: #121 ::

 

Acrylic paint on stretched can­vas, 18“x 24″

From the writer

 

:: Account ::

I’m a poet who pri­mar­i­ly writes found poetry—poems cre­at­ed exclu­sive­ly using the lan­guage of anoth­er writer. This means that unlike most writ­ers I’m not often tasked with fill­ing a blank page. I paint when:

  1. I feel a strong need to hold my own art­work in my hands—the intan­gi­bil­i­ty of poems I’ve writ­ten on my lap­top just doesn’t seem cut to it sometimes.
  2. I feel com­pelled to see how I can fill a blank can­vas with only the tools of acrylic paint and my own imag­i­na­tion at my disposal.

My found poems owe so much to oth­er writ­ers; they wouldn’t exist if Vir­ginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, and L.M. Mont­gomery had nev­er put pen to paper and pub­lished phe­nom­e­nal work. My paint­ings, on the oth­er hand, belong much more com­plete­ly to me and me alone. They of course fol­low in the foot­steps of abstract artists who came before me, but I’m nev­er con­scious­ly attempt­ing to mim­ic some­one else’s style when I paint. Armed with only mars black, tita­ni­um white, per­ma­nent magen­ta, cad­mi­um yel­low, and cobalt blue acrylic paint, I give myself over to the process of cre­at­ing some­thing com­plete­ly new and com­plete­ly mine. There is a free­dom in paint­ing that just is not pos­si­ble when writ­ing giv­en the very nature of found poetry.

I cre­at­ed my paint­ing “#121” as a gift for my niece who was, at the time I fin­ished it, 17 months old. I knew the paint­ing was going to be a part of the dec­o­ra­tions in her nurs­ery. All my paint­ings are essen­tial­ly orga­nized chaos, but for “#121” I made a con­scious deci­sion to work with bright col­ors, to attempt to high­light fre­net­ic joy instead of my more typ­i­cal (in both my poems and paint­ings) fre­net­ic, over­whelm­ing anx­i­ety and grief. Joy is dif­fi­cult to cap­ture in any medi­um, but it was the word most on my mind while I was paint­ing this piece.

Naz­i­fa Islam is the author of the poet­ry col­lec­tions Search­ing for a Pulse (White­point Press) and For­lorn Light: Vir­ginia Woolf Found Poems (Shears­man Books). Her poems have appeared in Gulf Coast, The Mis­souri Review, Boston Review, Smar­tish Pace, and Beloit Poet­ry Jour­nal among oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. She earned her MFA at Ore­gon State Uni­ver­si­ty. You can find her @nafoopal