Rilke:The Sonnets to Orpheus 1996

This is Rilke: The Sonnets to Orpheus by Maria Bozoky, and it feels like a watercolor that’s been coaxed into being, maybe with some ink? The colors are watery, like light filtering through a forest canopy. Dark greens and browns at the top give way to lighter pinks and blues. I wonder about Bozoky making this piece, trying to capture Rilke’s poetry in visual form. Maybe she was wrestling with the same things I do when I’m trying to translate an idea into paint: How do you make something immaterial, material? How do you find a form for something as elusive as a poem? The delicate lines suggest a figure, but it’s like a ghost, barely there. I bet she went back and forth, adding and subtracting, letting the washes bleed into each other to discover the form. It reminds me that all art, and painting especially, is a process of exchange with the great artists of the past and present. We're all just remixing what came before, hoping to catch a new angle of light. Painting is an evolving conversation, a continuous act of translating the world and our experiences into something tangible.