Southerly Exposure: The value of decoding the artist’s process

Why does the artist’s process fascinate? What is the mystery that exists between moment of inspiration and final brushstroke? How does a final, polished word interact with all the fragments of ideas required to fill a page?

Talking about art, its creation, inspiration and processes is of serious importance in a society. Societies where individual expression is suppressed, or access to art and its history of change is relegated to certain social tiers, is one headed for death. Or, at the least, is headed toward complete cultural stagnation and unawareness of self.

To not only present art in its showcased state — whether that be on a stage, in a gallery or in a newspaper — but to also create arenas for its public dissection, is to remove its veil and make it approachable as the life-affirming and life-changing instrument that it is.

It is this simple practice of talking about art in a controlled environment that creates new adherents, furthers the oeuvre of established artists and allows significant leaps for those who are emerging.

Examples include everything from the multitude of arts-industry professional conferences held in lavish hotels, to a salon on a rural library lawn after closing. It can separate a progressive and self-aware society from the dregs — and it merely requires the age-old idea of community, a designated leader and a goal of exploration.

In the coming week, three events exemplify this sort of dedication to remaining expressively vital, which is a cornerstone of Vermont communities. Three areas of creativity will be attacked from the inside out: painting, poetry and journalism.

Tonight at 7:30, Brattleboro Museum and Art Center presents Artist Talk with Ralph DeAnna. DeAnna’s current show at BMAC is titled “Time and Motion: Paintings,” and runs through Nov. 8.

DeAnna, a Brattleboro resident, approximates reality through a deconstruction of the human experience of time. Through the muted, blurred unraveling of one moment — single scenes depicted from multiple points of view, a seeming continuum within a static frame — he creates a snapshot of temporal experience through visual means. On the BMAC Web site it states very simply, “Ralph DeAnna is chasing time.”

He’s admitted to being heavily influenced by French author Marcel Proust’s attempts to “see” time through the constant disentangling of memory, made famous through Proust’s seven-volume tome, “À la Recherche du Temps Perdu” (“Remembrance of Things Past”), written between 1912 and his death in 1922.

Proust’s eye for sprawling detail, the way he could take the lace on a woman’s dress and from it extract the downfall of France’s moral character some several pages down the line, his obsession with the reporting of personal minutiae within the flow of an event … To think of such things being translated with paint is mind-boggling. And DeAnna wants to talk about it.

In discussing his process with the public ($6 general, $4 seniors, $3 students and free for BMAC members), he aims to highlight, in his words, how “the pictures are made up of a series of impressions which are fleeting; they appear to follow one another like memories of a journey, contained in time, perhaps connected or related to other experiences, other times. Instead of an iconic, self-contained image, my paintings suggest a temporal reality that is not yet complete.”

On Sunday, Oct. 18, the poetry of Robert Frost is tackled, as is the deep influence New England environs had on his work.

The Robert Frost Stone House Museum sits in South Shaftsbury, minutes from his Bennington gravesite. Built in 1769, the quaint colonial-style house’s famed “Frost period” occurred from 1920 to 1929, when the California-born, Massachusetts-raised poet lived and worked in Vermont for a time. His first Pulitzer-winning volume, called “New Hampshire” (1923), was composed in bulk there.

Frost’s haunting, meditative naturalist themes come alive on these seven acres that in 2002 opened as an extensive museum in his honor and that of his New England legacy. Frost spent many years in Derry, Plymouth, and Franconia, N.H.; Boston and Cambridge, Mass.; and Ripton in addition to the South Shafstbury site.

Tyler Resch, author of 14 books on regional history and culture, presents “A Nature Walk to Paran Creek with Historical Footnotes Along the Way” as a part of the Museum’s Sunday Afternoons with Robert Frost series.

The series occurs one Sunday per month at 2 p.m.; programs take place at the Little Red Barn behind the Museum. Resch’s presentation begins at the Barn and proceeds as a guided tour with botanical, ecological and historical commentary, with insight into Frost’s various works composed while on the grounds. The rain date for the free event is Oct. 25.

On Monday, Oct. 19, an art form often looked upon much differently than the above examples gets a moment under the microscope at Rockingham Public Library in Bellows Falls. At 5 p.m., Vermont Independent Media presents another installment of its Media Mentoring Project workshop series, Jeff Potter’s “Needles in the Haystack.”

Since January 2008 Potter has acted as editor of The Commons, a Windham County monthly newspaper.

Potter is an accomplished writer and editor who has had his hands in everything from poetry book design to hard news, through endeavors such as his own company, Potter Publishing Studio, and the newspaper he began in Massachusetts in 2004, the Shelburne Falls Independent.

Potter knows the tightrope-walk of taking facts and cultural observances and offering a version to the public through the quagmire of personal word-smithing — a version that is factually airtight and functioning under the strict guidelines of professional journalism, yet readable in a new era of the blurred lines of creative nonfiction. Modern journalism is a dance between research, quotation and apt metaphor functioning together on several levels, across multimedia platforms.

In “Needles in the Haystacks,” Potter leads an interactive session on finding the truth online and using it in writing and reporting, with acknowledgement to the Internet as the bold new force in information-gathering and dissemination. Studying the combination of wordplay and factual discernment will be paramount. The event is free and open to the public.

In a world changing as rapidly as ours, keeping a pulse on how creative people ingest, calculate, reconfigure and regurgitate that world — thereby keeping us aware of ourselves — is perhaps one of the noblest duties.

Clara Rose Thornton is a freelance cultural critic and arts journalist originally hailing from Chicago who now lives in an artists’ colony in Bellows Falls. She can be reached at clara@inkblotcomplex.com, or through her Web site, clararosethornton.com.