Thanks for the clarifications, Doug. Perhaps I'll buy her Mercury Press volumes.
I remember buying used & rare books from Nelson Ball in Toronto ca. 1975, but I don't
recall meeting Barbara at the time.
Barry
On Fri, 22 Jan 2010 10:40:37 -0700, Douglas Barbour <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:
>Thanks Barry, I'll think on what you say.
>
>Barbara was a good friend to a number of poets, & many of us own her
>work. She saw her work as a lifelong working out of some aspects of
>modernist abstraction, & was, as many artists are not, extremely
>articulate about her own & others' artwork. She has a number of books
>out from The Mercury Press, which you might check out on line
(http://www.themercurypress.ca/?q=authors/barbara_caruso)(the
> covers of the Painter's Journey books have b&w shots of her
>paintings if you can blow them up). So, yes, at first hard edged
>colours, but as her art 'progressed' she found many wonderful ways to
>juxtapose colours, always ones she made herself by mixing (how may
>blues, hell, how many 'blacks' even...).
>
>I learned an immense amount about art from her. She was married to
>Nelson Ball, a poet, & small press publisher back in the 60s. I
>expected to go on talking with her for many hears yet.
>
>Doug
>On 21-Jan-10, at 1:47 PM, Barry Alpert wrote:
>
>> Doug,
>>
>> I admire the sound patterning created by the recurrent letters
>> c,l,o,t. The constructed
>> world of her paintings neatly contained by the sound of the first
>> four lines ebbs a bit via
>> the verbs in the past tense connected to "mind" in lines 5-7, though
>> the sound of those
>> three words ending in "t" and "d" maintains artistic closure
>> overall. Until the openness of
>> the sounds governing the last stanza (five "o"s) renders a passage
>> finalized by the hard
>> "k" of "dark".
>> Barbara Caruso's name was familiar to me via her collaborations with
>> bpNichol and other
>> Canadian writers, but I was able to find even one image of her
>> paintings on the internet.
>> So I kept in mind hard-edged works by Washington Color School
>> painters Keneth Noland,
>> Anne Truitt, and Gene Davis which I had seen recently. I'm sure her
>> work is somewhat
>> different, but all of them apparently share color as subject matter.
>>
>> Barry
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