The Italian cover

I am thrilled with the jacket for the Italian translation of The Lantern, to be published in July by Piemme. It's a beautiful piece of artwork that captures the haunting romanticism of the book. There's a change of title too, to The House of Wind and Shadow, which is quite intriguing.

As soon as I saw the design it reminded me of Lynne Ciacco's work, especially City Lupins, pictured below.

I wrote a couple of blog posts last year about Lynne and her work, which I admire greatly for the sheer variety of experimental styles and the atmosphere and thoughtful playfulness she achieves. You can link to them here:

The art of entanglement
The art of translation

The art of translation

Alibaud is another softly beautiful and clever composition by artist Lynne Ciacco, that keys into that same mood captured in her City Lupins featured a few posts ago. It dovetails a photo of allium flowers by Owen Phillips, a picture of Lynne’s daughter and the written text of a Rimbaud poem, Sensation, in the poet’s own hand.

Like the first picture, it’s dream-like - an exploration of the subconscious perhaps - and evokes a powerful sense of time passing. If you look carefully, there’s a similar tracery of branches and stems in delicate white that adds another layer of detachment from the face behind, as if the girl is already out of reach. The effect is reminiscent of sentimental Victorian cards, romantic and nostalgic.

Although it’s correct to transpose the word “sensation” from French into English, it would perhaps be more helpful here to think of it with the emphasis on “feeling”. There are many translations available. The American poet Joshua Mehigan really seems to capture the sensuous lyrical simplicity of the original.

Blue summer evenings, pricked by stalks of wheat,

I’ll walk the paths, crush short grass where I tread:

Dreaming, I’ll feel its coolness on my feet.

And I shall let the wind bathe my bare head.

Click here for the whole poem in French with Mehigan’s translation and a biographical note about Arthur Rimbaud in the online literary magazine failbetter.com.

And for those who enjoy the nuances of translation, here’s another version, this time by A.Z. Foreman, a formidable linguist whose Poems Found in Translation blog (click here) is a wonderful site to get lost in. You can even listen to him read the poem in French, and hear how he brings out Rimbaud’s languorous rhythm and interior rhymes.

Through evenings blue with summer, pricked by wheat,
I’ll roam the roads and crush the grass I tread,
Will dream and feel its coolness underfoot,
Will let the breezes bathe my naked head.

I’m aware we’ve travelled away from Lynne Ciacco’s art, but actually these ramblings do illustrate something I feel very strongly: that different forms of creativity are all interconnected. I could, of course, be wrong. Some people don’t feel that at all. Not all artists like other people coming along and offering their impressions. As the French painter and pioneer of pointillisme Georges Seurat said:

“They see poetry in what I have done. No. I apply my methods, and that is all there is to it.”

Lynne Ciacco lives and works in Atlantic Canada. She has a fine art degree (BFA) from the Emily Carr Institute in Vancouver and works in diverse media, from acrylics to pastel and watercolours, as well as textiles. This is another example of her digital art using textured layers and blending modes. You can find her website here and her art blog here.

The art of entanglement

City Lupins by Lynne Ciacco



In this intriguing picture by artist Lynne Ciacco, a tangle of lupin flowers and branches obscures the house behind. Nature is taking over, perhaps even barring the way. The muted colours give a melancholy atmosphere, and the green in the foreground ceases to denote leaves, and hints at creeping damp on the outside walls.

Shadows beneath the tracery are not immediately apparent, but they are there, and once noticed, they seem to grow. Even the blue sky is overrun, as the house bleeds into it, blocking out the light. It makes for a rather eerie and intense disorder – or is that just how I choose to read it?

It reminds me very much of the scene that greeted us when we first arrived at our property here. It was July and a relentless sun had supercharged weeds and wildflowers in the courtyard. The grass on the terraces was thigh-high. In the five months since we had first seen it in winter (below), the place seemed to have changed and slumped further into decay, its bare bones reclaimed by a surging wildness.

Inside, the smell of mouse was overpowering. Drifts of dry leaves had found the corners of every room. Dead insects crunched under our feet. Scorpions scuttled up walls. We camped on stone floors, took note of the many large structural cracks in the buildings, and hoped for the best.

That first daunting summer, in between restoring order outside, sweeping and scrubbing, and meeting builders, I re-read Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, and wondered…what if I had come here knowing less about the countryside I was in and the man I was with? Who had lived here before us, and did anything of them remain? That’s when I started writing…

Lynne Ciacco lives and works in Atlantic Canada. She has a fine art degree (BFA) from the Emily Carr Institute in Vancouver and works in diverse media, from acrylics to pastel and watercolours, as well as textiles. City Lupins is an example of her digital art using textured layers and blending modes. You can find her website here and her art blog here.