London's Mayor Gallery has a current exhibit of Sylvia Plath's collected illustrations (Evidently, she was an avid drawer). The following article gives you a glimpse of these drawings:
Plath's Drawings
The author of the article says the following: "The astonishingly adroit drawings reveal not only the literary icon’s exceptional attention to detail, but also a kind of diverse yet introspective curiosity about the world, from nature to architecture, from intimacy to public life."
I find the drawing of the heels especially interesting, given that she titled it "The Bell Jar."
Greg: the illustration Untitled (Fruit Plate) would have served as an interesting visual epigraph for your Salinger essay. :)
I wouldn't go as far as to say I'm an artist, but I thought Plath's drawings were lovely. I liked that she had a range of talent and drew boats, houses, and cows. Even though her doodles are varied, the still is constant. This is similar to Plath's writing where her novel has the same imagery and metaphors that her poems do.
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I agree with Luisa that these paintings are well drawn and that the range and variety of these paintings also show how accomplished of an artist she was. One thing that really stuck out to me and to keep up with this time of paradox is that she titled one of her paintings ubiquitous umbrella. However, the umbrella is closed and wrapped up so how can it be every capturing the rain drops if its closed? Im not so sure if its paradoxal, but it is at least interesting and possesses some form of irony.
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What I found really interesting about Plath's drawings was that they were mostly of simple, everyday things like a pair of shoes, a fruit plate and a wine bottle. From her writing I would have thought her drawings would be intricate and abstract, with all the hidden symbolism and paradoxes that are make up her text.
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ReplyDeleteI don't have much experience to say anything from an artist's perspective, but she seems to have been able to draw fairly well. I find it odd that she has both simple drawings with one focus, like the cow and umbrella, as well as more complex scenes like "Harbor Cornucopia, Wisconsin" and "Cambridge: a view of gables and chimney-pots". All of the drawings appear to be uncomplicated in their own way, almost like they could have been drawn by a child (I am not implying anything about her artistic skills by the way).
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