A Poet and Painter Explore the “Human Spirit”

“This.”

A gilded sunrise, a field of poppies, a mean inner-city street or perhaps an artist’s painting — visual artists and poets respond to images that free our imaginations to see the world and “human spirit” through their eyes. Such is the case with two-time Louisiana Poet Laureate Darrell Bourque and the work of Shreveport artist Bill Gingles.

Over the last decade, Gingles, an internationally acclaimed painter represented by galleries in North America, Europe and Asia, and Darrell Bourque, an award-winning poet and professor emeritus at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, have collaborated on four books in which Bourque reflects upon Gingles’ abstract paintings — paintings that draw viewers deep into the imagery in search of meaning. Together, the poems and paintings create a soul-defining journey into one’s own conscience to remind us of who we are and, equally important, who “they” are.

In their 2019 book “migraré,” Bourque, who resides in rural St. Landry Parish, responds to those visual images through his poetry, not as literal interpretations of the painter’s intent but as impressions.

“The poems are not retelling or recontextualizing or creating a narrative from the images in the visual work,” says Bourque. “These poems build around the tensions, composition, line, color and the theater created in abstract expressionistic artworks by one particular artist — Bill Gingles. The poems are keyed to the paintings rather than extrapolated from them. The result is often a musical relationship rather than a visual-lexical one.”

Former Louisiana Poet Laureate Darrell Bourque

Bourque writes that his poems “are an attempt to ‘move into’ the experiences of Others so that we might begin to see each other more clearly, more justly, more humanely, see each other as occupants of place, respectful of difference, diversity, tribe, roots, clans and race, but more so, respectful of the overriding commonality of Being and the inherent Rights of Being . . . It is my hope that readers see in these poems their own histories.”

He says the “idea of Other is pervasive, insidious and ubiquitous. It knows no particular geography or culture or people or history or ancestry. We must be ever vigilant not to separate ourselves from each other in destructive and debilitating ways.”

Each poem and painting takes viewers on that introspective journey. In “The Last Overture,” for example, Gingles “troweled, scraped and scumbled” large rectangular swaths of paint with vague markings brushed and wiped into those fields of color. In the last stanza of the accompanying poem, Bourque writes, “What if in pour la fin du temps we hear the names of all those who’ve walked to some other shore: hear … names we call ourselves, hear all we call beloved in the last overture.”

For this and two other books, Bourque paired Gingles’ existing paintings with his poems. In a more recent book, “Until We Talk,” Bourque wrote poems based on Colum McCann’s 2020 novel “Apeirogon,” which explores the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the lives of two fathers, one an Israeli and the other Palestinian, who become peacemakers after the loss of their two daughters.

These poems, Bourque says, “are parallel stories connected to internments, sieges, settlements, reservations, slavery, plantation mentalities and erasures of every kind. The stories here link themselves to generational and historical traumas wherever they occur.”

“The Last Overture”

Gingles’ paintings, Bourque continues, have “the expansiveness and gravitas to match what I wanted this set of poems to do.”

As Bourque completed his poems, he sent them to Gingles to pair them with his paintings.

“I looked for something in the poem that could invite one of my paintings,” Gingles says. “Sometimes it was the title, sometimes a phrase, an event in the poem, the tone, sometimes a single word. I wanted the poem and the painting to be comfortable next to each other.”

The poem “She Was Ten,” paired with the painting “This,” struck Gingles. “I could see the father carrying the picture of his murdered daughter,” he says. “I could feel the pressure in the room as he pointedly slid the picture across the table for the senator to see. This. This is my daughter. You are responsible for this. This is the loss I live with.”

Gingles says he doesn’t “set about to illustrate any of those ideas, nor am I trying to symbolize anything. I’m not conveying any message. I’m just painting what feels right. What feels true.”

For each painting, he says he makes “all of the decisions. But as the painting wake up and begins to assert itself, I try to allow it to lead the way. If I’m too controlling, the painting can choke. If I let go too soon or too often, it can falter. That moving balance is where the magic happens.” 

In poetry or the visual arts, Gingles wants others “to feel the wonder and mystery of the human spirit as only the arts can convey.”

Shreveport artist Bill Gingles

Exhibits

Cajun: Rodrigue: A Louisiana Cowboy. Cajun Cowboys, the West and Rodrigue’s love of the land and open road, through April 4. Historic City Hall & Cultural Center, Lake Charles. visitlakecharles.org

Central: Enduring Concepts. Artists approach themes of people, place, emotion, spirituality. Permanent show. Alexandria Museum of Art. themuseum.org 

NOLA: Herman Leonard: Images of Jazz.  Work by famed post-WWII jazz photographer, through July 12. Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans. ogdenmuseum.org

North: Bloom! Juried exhibition exploring beauty of outdoors with power of artistic expression, March 26 through May 17. R.W. Norton Art Gallery, Shreveport. rwnaf.org

River Parishes: Daphnis and Chloe and Other Lovers: Lithographs by Marc Chagall, through May 24. LSU Museum of Art, Baton Rouge. lsumoa.org