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“Art is the creation of things that we don’t know”. This is how Brancusi, the Romanian-born visionary father of modern sculpture, defined art.

I find myself returning to Brancusi over and over, the man whose legacy and wisdom, as I was to find out during my trip to the Netherlands in November 2011, would open paths to the common ground where all art shapes and forms co-exist, where painting meets poetry and different discourses from different fields collide into harmony.

Florentijn’s creative mind found a frame for expressing her art in the margins of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. In the beginning of the MONA LISA PROJECT (2007-2008), her exploration led to 100 Mona Lisa portraits. Far from announcing the end of the project, the completed 100 Mona Lisas proved to be only a stage in her artistic investigation of idea and visual form.

To date, the Mona Lisa creative challenge continues, as there are close to 200 Mona Lisas exhibited at the artist’s personal gallery, at galleries around the world, as well as in private collections.

Exploration and soul-searching add a commonly recognizable streak of restlessness and longing to any artist’s life. It was a similar strain of exploration and soul-searching that drove me to the creative translation project based on my debut book of poetry, “The Incomplete Fantasy We Call Love” that I started developing in 2011. I chose to call this project 19, as there are 19 poems in English in my debut book of poetry. I have been meaning to translate each of them into my native Romanian for a few years now. After dropping and resuming the translation process several times, I realised that none of the single-version translations from English into Romanian proved satisfactory. As a result, I decided to continue writing translation versions moving from the English original to Romanian, then from Romanian into English and again to Romanian, and so on, making sure I followed creative paths opened with each translation, provided that no ideas were used more than once. This is how my poetic investigation of language, its possibilities and limitations emerged from the fertile land sown by “The Incomplete Fantasy We Call Love”.

Whether in the world of literature or art, the rewards of exploration and soul-searching are neverending. The parallels one may draw between different arts and artists in this respect are endless.

I will conclude this first blog post in 2012 with my best wishes to everyone opening the pages of my books or blogs, and with one more parallel between Florentijn’s Mona Lisa and the last frames from  the movie based on Garcia Marquez’s book Of Love and Other Demons, directed by an artist with a beautiful-sounding name, Hilda Hidalgo, who also signs the movie script. 

and they stepped out

in

a sea of light

. . .

.

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