When Visual Art Becomes Poetry

The complex inter-relationship between literary art and visual art is like an enigma to me.

This is not an intellectual puzzle I'm trying to figure out in my early 30′s. This is my life. This is what Escape into Life, online arts journal, embodies: the fusion of two types of media; art and literature; and the urge to discover what happens when a journal allows both forms to meld and grow as an organic whole.

pEscape into Life aims to explore, enmesh, and mostly, to uncover the core similarities of the two through the growth and development of technology, community, and inquiry.

At the most basic level, there's poetry and there's visual art; separate and distinct forms of artistic expression. Nonetheless–the history of visual art and the history of literature reflect each other to such a degree that it would seem visual artists and poets are made from the same

It's more like an intuition has grown over the years. Undoubtedly, my parents, my upbringing, my talents and lack thereof, contributed to these two equally strong influences in my life. Mixed exposure to both literary and visual art.

Escape into Life, online arts journal, is basically a new media experiment to blend, meld, mesh, mingle, interrelate, bind, juxtapose, and interpenetrate the two forms of art.

The best comparison is to a scholar or a scientist who comes to discover that their life-work revolves around a single theme.

Of course, there is reason for my interest in this subject of art and literature; and how they remain separate and distinct and yet intricately enmeshed. My mother was an oil-painter, I was exposed to art at an early age, and I was brought up in her creative shadow.

–and a life-long exploration of mine–that fuels the very online arts journal you are reading right now, called Escape into Life.

I have no philosophy or common goal I wish to convert our readers to. There is no academic bent or political ideology behind this journal.

Escape into Life pushes the boundaries of visual art, literature, and poetry.

The Pleasures are Fleeting

The Swan of my Youth

I awoke in the middle of a summer night,

To see her resting outside my window,

Reposing on a patch of lilacs, crashed

Flowers under her sparse plumage, looking out-of-place,

And out-of-time, depleted after many summers

Of migrating between the many lakes,

Searching for food or friendship or refuge from

The ill-tempered geese.

Unfurling her long neck, she assumed the pale moon,

And conveyed her solemn song with dignity.

My mother painted a self-portrait

That now hangs in my apartment,

I am staring at that painting now,

Remembering how, in her final days,

She retreated into her room,

And held herself there--above all of nature--

Without the taint of fear.

I remember when I rushed into her room, crying

How she poised herself,

Without a single feather stirring.

Podcasts by Chris Al-Aswad

In addition to his Blog of Innocence podcast, Chris started a YouTube channel in 2008 to explore and share what he had learned through his life experiences. Among the topics he wanted to talk about were poetry, philosophy and writing. In the video below, Chris talks about the characters in Dead Souls, a Russian novel by Nikolai Gogol.

The following is an excerpt Chris wrote in his own handwriting, from Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood by William Wordsworth.

From all of us who follow and love Escape into Life, thank you Chris, for everything.