More Emily Dickinson

I just dropped off An Exquisite Reply/ Emily Dickinson 500 to the Newburyport Art Association for the Arts and Letters exhibit which opens tomorrow and runs through July 30. While I think the work stands alone, I appreciated the opportunity to also submit some written explanation. Here is what I wrote:

An Exquisite Reply is part of a series that merges the nineteenth century words of the poet Emily Dickinson with the twenty-first century technology of Photoshop. I was inspired to create these images by the richness and density of Dickinson’s language. She captures the mystery of the physical world with words that are both crystalline and ambiguous. For me her poems demonstrate an acute and empathetic awareness. They contain words to savor and hold and allow the wonder of the language to echo in the mind.

The kaleidoscopic images were created from photographs of flowers found in Dickinson’s home state of Massachusetts. The lines from the poems (collected from The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson) were written with a brush pen and scanned into the computer where they were combined with the images. An Exquisite Reply is a line from Poem 500. The flower is Astrantia major which was photographed at the Cotton-Arbo Retum in Winchester, Massachusetts.


I also have three new pieces in the series which will soon go to John Raleigh for printing.