Dark Poem Painting

This is my painting of the untitled poem by Austrian writer Friederike Mayrocker, from her cycle Tod durch Musen (Death by the Muses), 1966. The cycle's form "stands as a meta-poetic commentary on the creative process, which is conceived as one of devastation."

I love this poem and my painting of it, not only because a close and gifted friend translated the poem so beautifully from the German and brought it to the English-speaking world, but also because both my painting and the poem reference my favorite subjects: dream, whimsy, language, narrative, absence/presence, trace, memory, imprint. The present moment, but it is infused with the trajectory of time. And of course, longing and the violence of loss.
-Vivienne Koorland