The Episcopal Church and Visual Arts

Discourse:
Word and Image

Paintings by Ruth Susen Riley
Poems by David C Cottingham

Symmetry
By Ruth Susen Riley

A picture is worth a thousand words – or less! David C. Cottingham of Manchester, Massachusetts and Ruth Susen Riley of Newburyport, Massachusetts have collaborated with words and images to create a dynamic dialogue engaging both mind and emotion. Responding to Riley’s paintings, Cottingham’s poems pick up on the underlying currents flowing through the various landscapes and symbols. Entering each painting with the mind’s eye, Cottingham takes the viewer places where he or she might not go alone, picking up on the visual nuances present in the image. Riley has also responded to one of his poems with three different paintings, allowing for further response from Cottingham.

During the month of March, 2007, Preston Cutler Gallery at Christ Church, Hamilton, Massachusetts, displayed the collaborative exhibit with paintings displayed along with an excerpt from each poem. The gallery also held a poetry reading and a booklet of images and poems was offered for sale.

In his book Real Presences, the scholar and literary critic George Steiner proposes a world in which “secondary texts” – the endless proliferation of academic commentaries on primary works of art (including his own commentaries) – are strictly forbidden. In such a world, works of art would be explicated, not by the various genres of intellectual analysis, but by other works of art. Great novels would be illuminated by other great novels, written perhaps centuries later. Great music would be echoed by the great music of following generations. Great paintings would be reflected upon by subsequent great paintings, or by the allusive and symbolic methods of poetry and fiction.

In a modest sort of way, the collaboration you see here is a small experiment in this kind of commentary, an attempt to engender one kind of art from another. The Discourse of the title connotes a conversation between disparate but complementary modes of representation.

For my own part, I can only say that Ruth Riley’s paintings lend themselves beautifully to this kind of dialogue. Even when they appear to be conventional landscapes or (deceptively) pretty surfaces, I find that there is always an undertone of meaning, as if each image is its own state of mind and thus implies an inseparability of inner and outer, of concept and percept, of subject and object. The world thus revealed turns out to be a kind of word – a form of speech as it were. And as Steiner suggests, the only language commensurate with this primary word is some form of art.

Whether we’ve succeeded here in some small way is not for us to say. The language of my poems seems hardly adequate to the task. If the words or images linger with the viewer, the reader, or the listener in some more-than-momentary way, if they shed light on each other or on the world or on ourselves, then maybe something has been achieved.

— David Cottingham, March 2007

About three years ago, David Cottingham and I discussed a collaboration: David writing poetry in response to some of my paintings and me painting in response to his poetry. It seemed to him a good excuse to write and gave me a sense of direction. We decided to do a collaborative exhibit at church to give us a deadline and scheduled it for a year ago this March.

Meanwhile, my elder daughter became pregnant while embroiled in a difficult relationship and while experiencing some serious emotional and mental problems with subsequent drug abuse. Five months after my granddaughter, Olivia, was born it became clear that my daughter would not be able to rise to the challenge of responsible motherhood. Thus began a difficult and drawn out process to gain guardianship of Olivia. Four months after Olivia came home to live with my husband and myself, my daughter was shot in the head by the man who was giving her shelter at the time. We delayed this exhibit for a year and in the intervening months life has assumed, if not normalcy, at least some livable pattern. The devastating emotions of the past two years are still very present but have subsided to a more tolerable background noise as life goes inexorably forward. Some of the paintings in this exhibit are directly related to these events, others speak indirectly to them.

All of the paintings in this exhibit suggest (I hope) a richer, deeper meaning than a decorative landscape or even my own personal angst. David has done an amazing job of gleaning meaning even where I did not get it. He has allowed his mind to wander within the confines of each painting and it has taken him far – as a work of art can, indeed, do. My motives for creating a painting vary but always there is the desire to tackle an aesthetic impulse, whether it be light, interesting colors and shapes or the expression of an idea or feeling within a particular context. It is my hope that the work presented here will enlarge the viewer’s perspective, reveal emotions with honesty and, perhaps most importantly, present works of art that merit your time and attention.

— Ruth Susen Riley, March 2007

Discourse: Word and Image included twenty-five paintings/poems by David Cottingham and Ruth Susen Riley. Eight of these works are presented below.

1	*Was It Cezanne? / Color of Rock III*	5	*Anabasis II*

2	*Symmetry*	6	*When the Bough Breaks*

3	*The Color of Sand: Footprints*	7	*Passage*

4	*Horizon*	8	*Whisperings*

David Cottingham, writer and poet, works for Houghton-Mifflin Publishing Company and as a freelance editor. His poems have been published in the Antigonish Review in Nova Scotia. David and his wife, Rebecca, are active leaders in the Readers and Writers Guild at Christ Church, Hamilton/Wenham, MA. He lives and writes in Manchester, MA.

Email: rebecca.cottingham@verizon.net

Ruth Susen Riley, painter, lives with her husband and granddaughter in Newburyport, MA where she maintains her studio. She is active in the Liturgical Arts Cooperative at Christ Church, Hamilton/Wenham, MA. Ruth shows her work nationally, has won several awards and is represented by galleries in the New England area.

Email: ruth@rsrileyfineart.com
Web site: www.rsrileyfineart.com