GEORGIANA MARCU – AN ARTIST ON THE RISE!!

I recently had the opportunity to interview, Georgiana Marcu, a young artist from Montreal, Quebec.
Her painting, "I Plan to Swallow Buttons" recently graced the cover of The Toronto Quarterly.
Marcu's paintings are quickly becoming more well-known in literary and art's circles across Canada and North America.
I hope my interview manages to uncover a little of the mystic that is, Georgiana Marcu.
Please visit the following web pages for more tid bits, gmarcu.com and gmarcu-art.blogspot.com.

- Darryl Salach (The Toronto Quarterly)






TTQ- Can you give us a little more background as to who, Georgiana Marcu is as a person? Where did grow up and go to school?

GM- I was actually born in Eastern Europe and moved to Canada with my parents when I was 12. I grew up as an only child and most of the time I had to find my own way of entertainment that didn't involve much interaction with my parents. I was brought up by my grandparents, in the outskirts of Bucharest, in a little home that my grandfather built with his own hands after the previous house got bombed during World War II. I thought that was a fascinating story and this little three room house was my home for most of my childhood. To think about it, that little very poor and limited environment made me who I am today. I don't remember watching much TV, I was thrown out of the house to play in the garden. When I got bored as a kid, I was told to either go do something outside, or I was given a piece of paper and crayons to play with, or I was sometimes given tools to make things and I'd create little doll furniture pieces for my dolls.
I was really shy as a child but thrived to break out of my shell and for that I'd always follow the trouble-maker kids in the neighbourhood, much to my grandma's horror to see me hang-out with the local Gypsy kids.

TTQ- Do you remember when you first became interested in art, be it painting or photography?

GM- I don't remember at what age this happened but early on, I think I was 2, my parents repainted my bedroom in our apartment and for some reason I was left alone to nap, or was in time-out. I remember finding some pencils and started drawing on the walls because I seemed to find comfort in creating some sort of creatures on the walls of my room. Maybe I wanted to create imaginary friends that would keep me company on my frequent time-out sessions. My parents never repainted the room and those drawings stayed there until we moved to Canada.

TTQ- Tell us about the first painting you ever painted and where is it hanging now?

GM- I don't remember exactly, but my suspicion is that the first I ever sold was this ugly painting I did of an imaginary face. Someone in Ireland bought it on impulse. I really do wonder if she still has it.

TTQ- How does one become an 'artist' in your opinion? Is it something you learned or is it passion?

GM- I don't think you can 'become' an artist. I think creativity is something you're born with. Sure, drawing and painting is a skill you can learn. You can learn to copy Dali and learn to paint like the Masters, but you can't learn to compose your own painting or to purposely create an interesting painting based on what you're thinking. But some people try and I think fail and it's that little thing that seperates the people who know how to draw from those who are artists.

TTQ- You once described painting in this way, "you paint when you don't feel like painting." What did you mean by that, exactly?

GM- I don't remember saying that. With my art, my ideas and moods change all the time, and this was probably one of those optimistic moments when I thought that painting when the moment wasn't there would be a good idea. That's not usually my moto. I generally don't paint if I don't feel the flow, because I tend to ruin a lot of paintings this way. This is the main reason I haven't painted in 2 months, the mood just hasn't been there. I have many unfinished pieces and I feel like the mood used to start them up is way past gone and overdue, that if I continue now, they'll take on another personality. I'd have to reorganize my thoughts and possibly begin again, but what was started will not be finished in the same light.

TTQ- I'm curious about your first set of 'bird series' paintings. Was there a particular theme you were trying to capture in that series and where are the paintings now? Is it true you destroyed them?

GM- The 'bird series' wasn't based on a 'theme', it was based on my personal life. The series was done during one of the winters a few years ago, and it pretty much represented the aftermath of an event. The birds represent my mind and heart and life as it were during that period of time. I felt dead and like a ghost. I'm normally a very cheery and happy person. Feeling so emotionally dead was unnatural for me. It was like I wasn't flying. It also went in the comparison to the death of nature that occurs during winter, the darkness and the cold. I think that was the longest winter for me. I don't really remember anything about that winter, except me staying up all night painting these gigantic birds.
None of the paintings from this series survived because of the whole idea behind them. I had them sitting around for a long time, and that following summer, I decided not to continue the project and erase them. It was like a healing process to erase the birds, thus erasing the memory of where they came from. I thought that having them around was really attracting negative energy for me and to move on I had to destroy them.
They actually all live behind these new paintings I've made since. No canvas was slashed, but new things went on top. Actually, one of the birds lives behind the "Royal Poinciana" painting I made that summer.


TTQ- You have a new series called, 'new yellow birds', and your painting, 'I plan to swallow buttons' was chosen for the cover of TTQ3. I understand the series was inspired by the poetry of Desi Di Nardo. Tell us about that and have you written poetry yourself?


GM- The new yellow birds were a series I tried to do at the request of Desi Di Nardo. She was quite disappointed that the old birds had been destroyed and she asked if there was a chance I could be inspired again to paint the birds from reading her poetry. I think the new series was a combination of her poetry, my choice of a bird that I thought would match the person I think Desi is, and a bit of the old birds. "I plan to swallow buttons" - the unfortunate demise of a bird fallen in love. Many of the old birds had these empty hollow bodies, the new birds are intact and they look whole and feel as though they still have a soul.
Actually, I do write poetry...I really don't know how to continue this thought. There's not much to say about my poetry. It's there. Nobody reads it. I don't share much of it. I always have words and lines flowing through my head, I just choose to not always write them down.

TTQ- Not only are you a painter, but photography plays a big part in your life as well. Why are both genres so important to you?

GM- I think photography is more of an obsession. My vegetable drawer in my fridge is full of old film rolls. I have a camera in my bag all the time and I take thousands of pictures of the same subject at different times of the day, different light, different moods. I particularly like to photograph utility poles and I find fascinating sparking in different light conditions. They're even better if they're decorated in ivy. Photography is a way for me to observe. I'm a big observer of what's going on around me. I take photographs and repeat and overlap, and over time this merged into what looks like a collection of memories, much like people's minds. They take and retain information, images, sounds, words, and they overlap and merge into each other and blur and confuse each other's information. I find that fascinating. The more confusing a photograph is, the better because I like to recall when and where it was taken, and what mood I was in when I took the shot, a process that's much like recalling a personal experience from the past, and it very much relates to painting as well.

TTQ- I've read that you enjoy traveling. Is that where you draw your inspiration from, visiting different places and cultures? Tell us about some of the places you visited recently?


GM- Traveling is part of my curiosity to observe people and hear different stories and see different colours. When I travel, it's like a surreal experience because I have this crazy idea that once you leave a place, it just stops in time and it stops developing from that moment you leave it, because that's where your memory ends. It's hard to explain how I think about things. Traveling is a source of peace and inspiration for me. My inspiration comes from the memories I live when I travel and also the photographs I take. I don't like rushed voyages. I like to take my time and observe everything, watch people and the way they live their lives and retain that information. I like going to quiet places that don't really get many tourists so that the people are pure and untouched by their need and desire to act a certain way to pleasure tourists.

TTQ- Have you decided that art will be your chosen career?


GM- I think art is already my chosen career even though I can't live off of it yet. But things will change I'm sure. I'd like to just travel and paint. Maybe paint a little bit in each corner of the world so I can say someone everywhere has a little piece of my art.
I think my goal will be reached when I sell my art or photography more regularly.

TTQ- What interesting projects are you currently working on?

GM- It's a shame to say, there's no painting that I'm working on. I'm shooting lots of film and playing with different cameras. Sometimes, I just shoot film and not develop it for months. I recently acquired expired film from 1983. It's slide and I'm not quite sure what will come out of it, if anything. It's so old, I could end up with blanks, but I love the mystery behind expired film. It's just awaiting a really fun summer adventure to photograph.





































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Facing down the enemy

Globe Books exclusive
Facing down the enemy

Poetry waves a flower in the face of utilitarian age, says the noted critic (and self-proclaimed candidate for the Oxford Professorship of Poetry) James Wood. And it is the guardian of language. So why doesn't it get the respect we owe it, Woods ask in his often hilarious speech at last week's Griffin Poetry Prize ceremony


James Wood

Wednesday, Jun. 10, 2009 10:23AM EDT

Custom dictates that an after-dinner speech should be amusing, but I want to talk briefly this evening about a serious subject: I mean the Oxford Professorship of Poetry. Most of you will know that the post is currently vacant, following first the withdrawal of the Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott, and then the brief appointment and resignation of the poet Ruth Padel, under scandalous circumstances: anonymous packages containing information about Mr. Walcott's sexual harassment of students were mailed to Oxford academics; and Ms. Padel, though at first professing blameless ignorance, seems to have had a hand in the dirty tricks.

The field is wide open.

I am using this speech to announce my candidacy as the next Professor of Poetry at Oxford. You may ask what my qualifications are. You may ask, but I may not tell you; and besides, I rather resent the implication that one must have qualifications. For the record, I have written a few poems over the years, and I fancy that some of them are quite good, better indeed than some of the so-called verse being so lavishly hosannaed tonight. Let me share with you something I wrote at the age of 10; it was published in my school magazine above my name:

Tiger, Tiger, burning bright
In the forest of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

I'll be honest and admit that my father helped me a little with this poem. When I look back, its diction seems a bit old-fashioned, and that half-rhyme of “eye” with “symmetry” seems lame. But it wasn't long before I was sounding edgier, more modernist. Here is what I wrote, again with my father's help, when I was 14:

Come in under the shadow of this red rock
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

I still think that's a pretty good effort for a 14-year-old and his zoologist dad to have come up with. On arriving in Toronto yesterday, I sat down, this time without my father's help, to pen this short lyric:

Toronto, city of maples stretched across the sky,
And the vivid ghost of Northrop Frye,
You do not lie, you do not lie
What jagged extremities you pose:
In summer as warm as Karachi,
In winter as cold as Kiev;
The home of Michael Ondaatje,
And lately, Michael Ignatieff.

It is true that I'm better know as a critic than as a poet, but I am what Wordsworth called his brother, John – a “silent poet.” And if everyone's a silent critic, everyone's a silent poet. The other day, The New York Times carried a reader's letter from someone called Anne Tolstoi Maslon. Apparently, Ms. Maslon is a novelist. Usually, when The Times runs a letter from someone who is a published writer but not an especially famous one, a descriptive assertion in italics follows the name, using the formulation: “The writer [i.e. of this letter] is a novelist/poet/playwright.” I was struck by the letter from Anne Tolstoi Maslon, because in her case it was followed by the line: “The writer is the novelist.” Not a novelist, but the novelist. I mean no disrespect to her work, but I have been unable to find any fiction by Anne Tolstoi Maslon. Now this set me thinking. If Anne Tolstoi Maslon, buoyed no doubt by the prestige of her middle name, could simply assert, “The writer is the novelist,” why could I not submit my candidacy to Oxford, thus: “James Wood. The critic is the poet.”

Of course, I have other qualifications, too. I am an accomplished teacher, a mellifluous lecturer, and have no known history of sexual harassment. (A foolish plagiarism charge brought against me and my father a few years ago was thrown out and declared “frivolous.”) I am younger than Christopher Ricks (the former Professor), and thinner than Susan Boyle (also rumoured to be interested). Every poet who has a go at the Oxford job needs a campaign team, and I am here to announce it: my father, still going strong at 82, will be my chief of staff (he has also generously agreed to deliver one of my lectures at Oxford); one of the Griffin Trustees, Robin Robertson, will be in charge of the day-today running of the campaign; and the Griffin Trust has very kindly offered to pay for the considerable costs – thank you, Scott.


“ Finding a poetry review in a popular newspaper is now like trying to find classical music on American radio ”

We are able to laugh at all of this because the Oxford debacle offered the spectacle of serious people acting foolishly. It was painful, not least because it allowed journalistic mockery of two worlds easy to mock: academia and poetry. Britain's increasingly anti-intellectual culture was delighted to find that, indeed, the fights within such worlds are all the fiercer because the stakes are so low. How hilarious to be squabbling over a few lectures, a few thousand pounds

Would the journalists have laughed in the same way if novelists and not poets had been squabbling? I doubt it. For poetry has suffered a crucial shrinkage of respect: I mean the disappearance of serious mainstream poetry reviewing. Finding a poetry review in a popular newspaper is now like trying to find classical music on American radio – one faint station can be heard on FM, maybe, but the reception is lousy, and it is always Mozart anyway. The New Yorker, where I write, used to employ Helen Vendler as a regular poetry critic; now it is rare for that magazine to devote 4,000 words to a poet. The New York Times employs a poetry reviewer whose last long piece was about the verse of Clive James.

What has consumed the space? The great, fat, greedy monster of the novel, which sucks all the vital nutrition away for itself. The big prizes – Griffin excepted – are for novels, the big advances are for novels, the author interviews are for novelists. Fiction is business, poetry isn't. (Years ago, novelists used to speak of having a novel “accepted” by a publisher; now they talk about “selling” it.) Suppose Geoffrey Hill publishes a new collection. He will get reviewed, of course, but at what length and with what seriousness? But when Ian McEwan publishes his new novel, he can expect 20 to 30 reviews in newspapers and magazines, many of them searching essays of several thousand words.

There are at least two effects of this shrinkage. One is that, pragmatically speaking, poetry has less muscle, less heft, less public presence, than it should have. “Not bad, for a poetry reading,” is how people talk, already twisted into a cringing posture of self-disrespect. The second is that the crucial function of criticism – to explain texts – is not going on in the world of poetry. The middleman – the critic – has been capitalistically excised, and the poem and its audience stare at each other across a vast ignorant space. Recently I heard the poet Robert Pinsky and the thriller writer Elmore Leonard on the radio. Pinsky had just reviewed Leonard's new novel. (Tellingly, we can't imagine Leonard reviewing Pinsky, for that would seem, commercially speaking, like the master dressing his own valet.) Pinsky said that some of Leonard's prose had the compression of verse, then asked the novelist if he read much poetry. No, was the reply – it's too difficult to get into.

The longer poetry is absent in this way, the harder it is for it to find its way back into popular comprehension and respect.

There are things we can do. Prizes like the Griffin are important – valuable in themselves, they also function within the marketplace to give poetry a bit of a swagger, like carrying a piece. We must lobby – polite word for shame – literary editors to carry more poetry reviews (I myself intend to start writing poetry reviews at The New Yorker). We should embarrass our novelist friends – why is it okay to be up on David Foster Wallace but not on John Ashbery?

Poetry waves a flower in the face of a highly utilitarian age. That great secular hybrid, pragmatic evolutionary psychology and neuro-aesthetics, is busy telling us that art is a slightly puzzling evolutionary superfluity. Art is defended as “cognitive play,” crucial for the evolutionary development of homo sapiens. Art, for such people, must always somehow be justified. But poetry sings the song of itself, and offers a musical gratuity. Just as no one should have to justify, in pragmatic terms, playing the piano or listening to Bach, so no one should have to justify reading Keats or Wallace Stevens. And I am not making the weak case that poetry evades or exceeds such pragmatic cost-counting, but that it challenges such utilitarianism, makes it doubt itself. It faces down the enemy.

Poetry can justify itself, of course (as music can), and might do so thus: Poets guard the language. They are the archivists, the philologists of the language, alert to what Virginia Woolf called “language with roots.” I find that poets are routinely better versed (the pun is instructive) in the history of their art than are contemporary novelists. Think, for a second, of how important at present this guardianship has become. In the last few years, there has been nothing less than a war on words. On the one hand political euphemism has been rampantly deployed (“collateral damage,” “waterboarding,” “rendition,” “stress procedures”); on the other hand, those skilled in verbal nuance have been derided as prissily “professorial” (President Obama was routinely mocked during the election as a mere “man of words”), and the very inability to use language with precision has been held up as a mark of authenticity (George Bush, Sarah Palin). And just as Orwell feared, there has been a direct link between a shifty and immoral use of language and a shifty and immoral politics. Poets have a public function just as much as a private one.

When Robert Lowell published his book of free translations, Imitations, Vladimir Nabokov, a literal translator, was enraged. “How would Mr. Lowell like it,” he asked, “if I translated his fine phrase ‘leathery love' into Russian as ‘the large football of passion'? ”

There has been a lot of passion, poetic passion, on display here tonight. Once all this is over, and the wine glasses have been cleared away, and the winners have banked their cheques and the losers pawned their sorrow, let us punt that large football of passion across the field and into the enemy's goal.

James Woods is a novelist and a literary critic for The New Yorker magazine. This is the text of the speech he gave at the Griffin Poetry Prize ceremony in Toronto last week.