spuytenduyvil

The Color Mill presents a group of images painted by Nathlie Provosty in 2010–12. When the poet Robert Kelly saw the pictures, he responded to them with the texts included here. “Chemic” and “The Odes of October” are the two inversions, where image followed text.

 

 

The undying mystery of words and pictures together sets the stage for an enactment. “We are made of what/goes on paper and comes off it,” and here in The Color Mill that essential poetics is enacted on the “human edge” with a grace and generosity that stops time. Because time is “a lie/that color tries to heal us from,” and the balm of resemblance and rhyme also heals—briefly, only briefly (vistas onto vistas). But things do respond to being seen, and “seeing something/it turns out is the same as being born.”

     David Levi Strauss, author of Words Not Spent Today Buy Smaller Images Tomorrow

 

Robert Kelly is in a formidable place with his work in the past few years. The richness and density of his language and imagery is now combined with a transparency and luminosity that is entirely new. There’s also a deep drama to the work, as if everything he writes is a message from “beyond.” As with the I Ching, ask a question and open at random: the answer is there. Evocations rather than illustrations, Nathlie Provosty’s images occupy a similar state of becoming, and remind us of the primordial origins shared by word and image. The Color Mill is work that bears re-reading many times.

     Raymond Foye, author of Harry Smith: The Alchemical Image