reflections on an unrealized project: “and a color, divine” (2022)

In 2021 I was approached by a friend of a friend and asked to create a book about Leonardo da Vinci. I knew (even now after extensive research) very little about da Vinci, but I’ve always believed one should say “yes” to as many new opportunities as possible.

My initial idea for the project was to create a series of cut-up poems (here is William Burroughs, one of first and most prolific adopters of the method, discussing its genesis) based on da Vinci’s writings coupled with collages made of his paintings and erotic photography. Below is a draft (the poem has not been published, or even finished) of a cut-up made from da Vinci’s notes on sculpture.

of wish is drying gift
the boat and a hollow
mold can support the horse and its joints
all equal in fingers and earthquakes
between sand and clay and half awake
the iron half too
reason and plaster should be used
eggs melted for god
bricks, pieces of bricks, drying in the sun
rubbish in a square
the importance of intervals begotten
plaster this
pay
the distance for bronze
enclosed///wax
recompose to cover can load mixed and a cover bronze finished
which the horse will lose to its core
thickness white, terra outside of time

This draft is very, very rough, and far from complete. While there are some lines I enjoy and have borrowed for other poems, this piece ultimately fell short. This is close to what many of my poems look like in their initial phases, just without any sort of personal connection. My longer poems seldom come out fully formed (haiku will, occasionally). The poems usually come in individual lines over days or weeks. Eventually I will sit down with this collection of lines and cut them up, rearrange them, and weave them together, adding and subtracting lines as I see fit until I’ve got something I feel a connection with. This process did not seem to work with the da Vinci project. I kept hitting roadblocks, even after dozens of pieces similar to the above, and hours of editing and rewriting.

I decided that a new direction was needed. The only surviving element of the cut-up phase was the title, an anagram of “Leonardo da Vinci”: and a color, divine.

At the same time I was working on this project I was experimenting with digital editing software, specifically Gimp. I was fascinated by digital photography, specifically “breaking” photographs with heavy editing. I noticed that after extreme edits, images not present in the original photograph would begin to appear. I am horrible with computers and know very little about how they function, so I asked a friend about this. They advised me that when photo editing software is asked, for instance, to brighten an area of a photograph, it guesses what is in the dark areas. After sufficient editing the software will be mostly guessing, creating images not originally present. Below I have included examples of these early experiments. I no longer have copies of the original photographs, but they were all black and white nature images taken a few months earlier in Melbourne, Florida while my wife and I were living there. These photos were all simple photographs of trees, the beach, and the sky.

It occurred to me that I could, perhaps, apply these methods to the paintings of da Vinci. I thought I would include these manipulations alongside some poems written while meditating on the originals, and perhaps some excerpts from my dream journal. When I’m deeply invested in a project I usually have dreams about it, and I have maintained a dream journal for many years, a habit I encourage every person to take up. I reached out to the contact who approached me about this project with the examples I provided above. He was quite enthusiastic and he provided me with high resolution photographs of the known paintings directly from the galleries that house them such as The Uffizi Gallery and The Louvre.

I went to work and within a few weeks had test images for the majority da Vinci’s known paintings and approximately two dozen poems and dream excerpts. I delivered this manuscript to my contact, noting that only a few more weeks of work would be needed. My contact was again extremely enthusiastic and agreed to publish it, offering to translate the poems into Italian himself and have his wife translate it into French. It was meant to be released in April of 2022 to mark the 570th anniversary of da Vinci’s birth in English, Italian, and French editions.

Elated, I finished my work on the project and submitted the manuscript for edits. I received a few notes and some of the French translations for review. I made my suggestions (I know some French and studied it briefly in school) and we discussed a contract, and possibly getting the images projected onto the galleries holding da Vinci’s paintings. It was around this time that the project fell apart due to a number of issues, chiefly financial and medical. I am no stranger to medical and financial issues, as both an individual and as a publisher, and have had to pass on projects I truly loved. I hold no hard feelings toward my contact and still speak with him and his wife every few months.

Since then, many of those poems have been repurposed for other projects, such as the silent crucifixion (Between Shadows Press, 2022) and orpheus’ clock of snow. The third section of the title poem of the silent crucifixion is one of those poems, just with a few edits to make it work within the mythology of Adam and Eve.

*Part three of my poem “the silent crucifixion”, included in the chapbook of the same name from Between Shadows Press, 2022.*

The images, however, have just remained in a folder on my hard drive, untouched aside from two, The Baptism of Christ and Benois Madonna being included in the second issue of D.O.R. in 2023, edited by Lachlan J. McDougall. I have decided to include most of my color divine experiments below. While some of these are complete, others are unfinished.

Some of the project is currently pending publication, and will not be included for that reason. Notable exclusions are, perhaps, the most well known of da Vinci’s paintings: Mona Lisa and The Last Supper. I apologize for their exclusion. Additionally, I will not be including the poems I wrote for this project in this post since most have been dissected and used in other projects.

The Annunciation