Simple Brushstrokes on a Naked Canvas by Howie Good
This is Five Miles (Simple Brushstrokes on a Naked Canvas) by Swoon (Marc Neys), made with the text of a poem from Fugitive Pieces, Howie Good’s new collection of poems. Here’s what Marc blogged about it:
So. A New year. New sounds. New videos. A big new project (more on that one later)
A solo exhibition (more on that one later) and
New collaborations.My first video of the year is Five Miles (Simple Brushstrokes on a Naked Canvas)
I first got the idea for this when reading ‘Fugitive Pieces’ by Howie Good.
It’s a great book of found poems published by Right Hand Pointing Press.
All proceeds from the book go to the Food Bank of the Hudson Valley.People who follow my work, know I’m a big Howie fan. His writing moves me and (very often) is a perfect fit for my videos and sounds.
In Fugitive Pieces Howie Good used the techniques of the collagist.
The poems are collages sourced from various texts as well as his own imagination.
From the author’s note:This meant creation through destruction, lifting things from one context and dropping them into another, establishing unfamiliar relationships among familiar objects.
That sounds a bit like creating videopoetry. I often find myself using that same approach (especially when working with found footage or archive material)
I first created a track around samples I took from a documentary ‘Target for today’.
Only after creating that track I chose a poem from ‘Fugitive Pieces’: Simple Brushstrokes on a Naked Canvas
The poem was the perfect match for my soundscape and would work well as ‘text on screen’ in a film composition.[…]
I collected footage (from Videoblocks) to combine with certain lines from the poem. Played around with timing, font and placement of the text and started puzzling it all together. I believe it works well.
Click through for the text of the poem (or, you know, just watch the film).
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Dave Bonta is a poet, editor, and web publisher from the Appalachian mountains of central Pennsylvania.
