The line drawing me closer and closer to the works of French Canadian artist Alexandra Levasseur is first and foremost the color. Her works don’t necessarily overwhelm the senses with bright colors and patterns, but rather nudge a viewer into noticing all the small details. Paintings I otherwise would have labeled too busy and over-stimulating become interesting to look at in their entirety. My eyes first notice the color palette, and secondly, the facial expressions of her human subjects, often colorful themselves to match their environments.  

Temps Transfiguré

Levasseur’s works incorporate elements I enjoy in Januz’s Miralles’ work—a combination of hyperrealism and surrealism that doesn’t translate into fantasy but rather very real emotions pulled out into a physical realm.

Réincarnation Secrète

Allow yourself to look over these selected Levasseur works before free writing. The colors all create a different mood—the lack of expression, of body, and the surplus or repetition of the body, all do different things. This can be done in poetry as well. 

Body of Land

Add color to your writing—whether that mean literal names of colors, or colorful language you aren’t familiar with, or a description of a color without naming it. 

Summer Heat

Imagine if you were larger than your landscape. 

All images courtesy of Alexandra Levasseur

Inspiration through the artwork of Jenny Saville

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In an interview with The Guardian, British artist Jenny Saville states, “I think I’ve accepted that making things that are beautiful is interesting, whereas before I was not interested in beauty at all. I was anti-beauty, I would say. I like that something reveals itself slowly, it doesn’t have to shout it. That’s shocked me.” 

Saville gained fame in the art world young—by her early twenties, her subversions of the ideal female body, signature due to huge canvases containing bloated, overweight, fleshy bodies—were displayed in galleries across the United Kingdom and the United States. 

Fulcrum

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Even in Saville’s portraiture, it is easy to believe she used to be anti-beauty, looking for other means besides contemporary visually appealing standards to create.

Entry

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Bleach

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Stare

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Similar to visual art, I believe poetry also has this underlying expectation of beauty—observations of nature, the elements, placing people on pedestals, sealing lovers in metaphors. And of course, the macabre in poetry has always existed, same with visual art. Maybe I’m alone in this opinion, I’m no art collector—but I wouldn’t describe Saville’s work as macabre, or even really grotesque, either. Most of her pieces don’t have to with death, but life. Blood, motherhood, nudity, sex, womanhood, facial expressions (last time I checked corpses are somewhat limited in that function). There is an in-between idealized beauty and abject horror/death, and this is where life happens. Often mundane. Occasionally charming, crushing. How do we define ourselves in this in-between? How do we recognize the nuances and grey-areas surrounding us in our art? How do we represent them as truthfully as we can? There are target audiences; there is the ever aesthetically pleasing inclination to represent what could be rather than what is.  

While there is nothing wrong setting out to contort reality, often this is a form of escapism and avoidance. Once again, this isn’t wrong, or counterproductive. But today, I challenge you to write your reality. Saville’s artistry may shock—but there are cultural reasons of what is acceptable and unacceptable provoking this reaction. I invite you to think of this as you write. Don’t set out to write beauty, to write death. You could set out to shock—but I would argue life itself, in all of its bloody truth, is unexpected enough. 

Read more of Alyssa's work on Floodmark.

Pink Mountain

Intimidating and full of possibility—I think tree roots, sets of antlers shedding their velvet, rivers breaking into smaller flowing vessels, thin wrists dashed with purple, twisted branches, talons wrapped around their perch. Nature, our own biology, is the place to look when we’ve become too one-track minded and forget that our narratives are branching and multi-faceted. 

When I look at Brooks Salzwedel’s art, I am reminded of this. 

Ship Wreath

Salzwedel uses a variety of media to construct his mystifying yet familiar pieces, such as graphite and tape. 

Bridges, Weeds

Almost everything in his artwork is recognizable at least in shapes: trees, weeds, mountains, ships, and bridges. However, his style obstructs conventional view. Nearly every shape is reduced to a silhouette. These objects are layered over one another, sometimes flared out, sometimes fogged out of their detail. 

La Cienega

Salzwedel’s artwork may cause a viewer to feel displaced. There is no era, no specific location on the map in relation to any of his creations. Someone who is lost, who feels the painful branching of their life from what they thought it would be to what it really is, can see themselves in this art. The separation of mind and physical place, of what “should be” and what is, can certainly cause reality, while ever-familiar, to take on dissociated forms.   

Nobody Told Me

The excitement and the distress of the unknown combine in recognizable shapes and shadows. Wherever you are, Salzwedel reminds you you’re on your way. Among the complicated place within nature and yourself, you move forward. 

LA 6^th St.

You can view more of Brooks’ artwork on his website.

Read more of Alyssa's work on Floodmark.

Go to Wangechi Mutu's website and you'll see a picture of the back of a woman's head. The woman has braids, gathered in two coils and woven with blue fabric on the sides of her head. There's something visceral and unexpected about seeing someone's scalp and the back of their neck. They're not parts of the anatomy that we're trained to pay attention to. Stay long enough, and you'll see three clouds blossom, filled with swathes of color and texture.


And that's it. No menus, no pointer that changes into a hand when you hover over a clickable link. Your cursor has already changed into a brown hand with long, painted nails, wearing a kind of woven or knitted fingerless glove.


I won't give away the secret of the navigation menu. That would be going against the spirit of Mutu's website and her work–unexpected, colorful, thoughtful–both of which encourage you to take your time.


Vivid, visceral compositions using elements of sculpture and collage, Mutu's work makes me think about what it means to exist with everything that inhabits this world. Mutu spends a lot of time doing that as well. Born in Kenya, educated in Wales and the US, and currently working in New York, Mutu started Africa's Out! last year, "a bold loudspeaker and a groundbreaking proponent for gender and sexuality equality that calls for radical change through 'Imaginative Activism', creative brilliance, and new effective methods of articulation."

Take a look at some of these works by Mutu, and think about her methods of articulation:

Automatic Hip
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Forbidden Fruit Picker
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Ghost Children
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Look Before You Swallow
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Our Eyes Were Watching
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Primal Glare
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Sleeping Sickness Saved Me
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You Are My Sunshine
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The Prompt

Now pick a work that inspired you most (or, if you're feeling especially inspired, pick all of them!), and incorporate elements from it into a poem. Is a certain color particularly prevalent? Movement? A gesture? A mood? Collage? Honestly, in most of Mutu's works, it's all of the above. If that seems overwhelming, pick one aspect to focus on. But, the more you can work with, the better. The subject is up to you, though you can draw inspiration about that from Mutu's works as well.


And, if you write something you're proud of, why not share it with us?

Read more of Rukmini's work on Floodmark.

Have you been looking for a sign? I found a couple you might be able to use in your writing. 

This post is part of an effort I've been making an effort in 2016 to notice things I normally gloss over. Throughout the summer, I'll be writing posts to share my findings with you. (You can find my writing prompt using the scientific names of moths & butterflies here.) For all my nerdiness, signage usually falls under that umbrella of "things I should pay attention to but just don't". I was hiking on  Amelia Island in March (more on that trip here, if you're intrigued) and I noticed these lovely little signs explaining the flora and fauna along the trail. I made myself stop to read them all, and somewhere along the way started collecting them to share with you. 

I'll share my favorites below for you to read. At the end, I'll whip up a little writing prompt to help you put all this inspiration to good use. Ready? Let's take a walk in the woods and beaches of Florida. 

This one is a little tough to read, so I've typed it up for you:

"LIFE FROM THE DEAD
Even after death, trees abound with other forms of life. Bacteria are decomposing the plant tissues. Termites, wood boring beetles and carpenter ants are feeding within. These are eaten by woodpeckers, lizards, toads and shrews. The web of life will, in time, reduce this tree to a rich brown area of humus on the forest floor waiting to be used by other living things. "

The Writing Prompt 

I've got two ideas for you.

1. Have you ever heard of Found Poetry? We have a handy post on it here. I think these signs are prime content for a found poem. Try your hand at writing one based on them.

2. Pull a few (5-10) words or phrases from these signs and write them in your notebook. Try to write a poem using all (or at least the majority) of the words that you've chosen. My recommendation is to free write and get a sense for how you want to use them and try to fit them in a poem/image from there.

Happy writing, Floodmarkers! More inspiration to come from my efforts to be more observant.

Read more work by Alexandria on Floodmark.

It’s time I admit it. I have a love affair. With my macro lens. 

There’s something about the impeccable detail and clarity of macro shots that makes me an absolute chump for macro photography. Those blurred backgrounds though…

Consequently, it was only fitting that this past January when I was supposed to be focusing on landscapes for a class assignment, I kept getting sidetracked and taking extreme close ups of dead plants. Sue me. (I know my dad wanted to, when on our walk together, I stopped for upwards of ten minutes to get 50+ different angles of crusty, dried out plants while nonstop raving about how cool it was that close up, a flower could look nothing like a flower and instead more like a sea sponge, or an insect, etc., etc.) 

That last image reminded me so much of something you’d find in the sea that I ended up using it in an surreal edit, casting my little sister as Annabel Lee, the titular character from the Edgar Allan Poe poem. (I said I was sorry, Mom…)

The Prompt

Use the images to make a metaphor or a simile. Look at each picture not as a picture of decaying vegetation, try to look at them like you would an inkblot test, or up at the clouds. I saw a sea sponge in one of the images…what do you see in some of the others? A fox’s tail? A deer’s antlers, heavy with shedding velvet? The aftermath of a bonfire pit? Then free write about what you see. Connect your images back to what the image is in reality, if you wish. Mix together the real and surreal, make the mundane or lackluster into poetry. I’ll bet it’s one of the things you do best. 

Read more of Alyssa's work on Floodmark.

Phones with cameras on them have certainly changed the way we view our everyday lives. How many snapshots have you taken, promising yourself that you'll get onto Instagram later and share it with the world? How many photos have you snapped for no other reason than you wanted to remember something? And still -- how many more pictures haven you taken and then promptly forgotten about? 

For me, that answer is: more than I can count. 

I'm the worst about snapping photos and forgetting about them instantly. I was flipping through my photo library the other day, looking at photos I have no recollection of taking, when I realized this might make for some neat inspiration.

Below, I'll share some of my favorite unremembered snapshots. I hope they inspire you to write, or at least to go seek out your dusty pictures in the recesses of your "Camera Roll" and see what you might find. 

See the world through my eyes.

The Blue Mosque in Istanbul.

When you find an unexpected photo of yourself among the landscapes. (Hiking The Narrows at Zion in Utah.)

A page out of my notebook from about 5 years ago.

In a little apple orchard in East Moline, IL.

Your guess is as good as mine. 

Have no idea where this one was taken.

I found this drawing in the Tate Modern in London.

You can't tell (or maybe you can), but it was 20 below freezing and there was a kite festival.

Spoiler: I made it.

Over the river and through the woods...in the Morton Arboretum.

Turkish rugs in Istanbul.

A deer that walked down the narrow slot canyon we were hiking. 

At some point in my life, I successfully photographed the perfect rainbow over my house. And I don't remember it.

A cast of the real thing -- like all the statues in the Cast Court at the V & A museum in London. 

The Prompt

Either choose one of the photos above, or find your own forgotten snapshot. Use it as your writing inspiration for the day. If you don't remember anything about taking it, try to fill in the blanks -- write about what you might have been doing, how you might have been feeling, etc. Create a backstory to the photo. If you do remember what you were doing, write down some of the details that come to mind so you don't forget again. Maybe you'll remember something amazing. 

Read more of Alexandria's work on Floodmark.