Rilke :Les sonnets à Orphée 1996

Maria Bozoky made this watercolor and ink drawing, Rilke: Les sonnets à Orphée, on paper. It’s a dance, a gesture, a poem in visual form. I can imagine Bozoky’s hand, moving across the paper, searching for these figures as they emerge from the page. There’s a lightness, a sense of play. The figures are sketched with ink, and it looks like watercolor has been washed over the top. I notice how the ink lines almost dance with the watercolor, creating this sense of movement. I wonder if she was thinking of the way Rilke’s words create images, and if that influenced her process. It reminds me how Cy Twombly made paintings in response to poetry, the way one art form can inspire another, it’s a conversation through time, across mediums. Painting, like poetry, embraces that openness, that feeling of endless possibilities.