Tag: Craft

What It Means To Be an Artist

My biggest fear is waking up on a Monday morning, with warm sunlight seeping in through my paneled window, the sound of birdsongs coming in through the ventilation and realizing that someone that I love or have loved, is gone. The idea of that imaged latches onto my insides with bird claws and doesn’t let go until I find something to distract myself with. That’s where Kieona Wallace’s “Return Date: 5/11/1974” really hit me. With her sour story on a man who returns home from war, different than from when he left and the aftermath of the different feelings his wife has to go through. This is the  type of story that forces me into perspective of my own fears. The main character didn’t lose him, but at the same time she did and I can’t seem to wrap my head around how you’re supposed to cope with that. It reminds me of holographic figure. The person is there, they look the same, they sound the same but the smell is gone. The smile has dimmed and there’s something in the person’s eyes that make you uneasy.

Those are the type of stories that make Elan what it is. The ones that dig down into your core and bring something out of you, something that you can grasp onto and look at with wholesome eyes. The type of artwork and writing that makes you lose your breathe and take a step back wondering how someone so young could do so much. Without literary magazines like Elan, people would still be stuck in a idiotic whirlpool mindset that you have to a certain age to produce something as fantastic as Kieona did. People like to blame things one experience. My grandpa in particular preaches on a day to day basis that I can’t know anything about the world because I’m not old enough. He, as do many others, believe that unless I’ve lived for fifty years I’ll always be shallow and naive. Elan proves people like him wrong. You can’t sit down and write about things like this unless you know.

What people like my grandfather fail to realize is just because I haven’t been through a divorce, doesn’t mean I don’t know what heartbreak feels like. I learned that when at the age of two when my parents never came back. Or that because I don’t pay mortgage, I don’t know how to be responsible. I learned that age the age of twelve when my grandmother was getting to overwhelmed to raise a 9th kid. I’m seventeen and me, along with almost everyone else in my generation have more through more crap in one year than most people go through in their entire lifetime. Elan allows people to display that, it allows for all of those talented artists being shooed away into a closet to step out and show everyone what it means to be a writer. What it means to be an artist.

– Sierra Lunsford, Website Editor

Taking a Moment to Enage with Art

Two bodies pressing against one another, grabbing hold of their clothes, and resting their heads together. This painting’s background is screaming with colors: pink, white, purple, yellow, green, blue, and brown. At first glance, I thought this piece was possibly a Madonna and child painting. The elegance of the woman, her eyes steadily watching me, felt like a raw declaration of something. The second person, their face covered with a drape as if they service a bigger purpose than to show facial expressions, is clinging to the woman. The closer I looked the less it became about mother and child, and more about intimacy. Élan editions are about intimacy with writing and art.

The vibrant lines of color are formed into straight lines, bar almost, and with only two holding back the people in the painting by their shoulders. The lines could’ve gone through their faces, or their necks, but the fact that they overlap their shoulders feels protective. I think of being captivated, blocked by something else. I’m a believer that sometimes not writing can leave a person blocked, but reading can trap someone in another word. Sometimes when I read poetry I don’t even feel like a human being, I don’t realize my brain is processing literature or that I’m reading the words right off of someone else’s thoughts. I think sometimes we forget that when we read someone else’s work – poetry or fiction or nonfiction – and look at someone’s visual art, we are literally peering into someone else’s heart and I think that’s beautiful.

The woman’s body, who I originally believed was a version of the Madonna, is full of swirls. Her twists and spirals even inch onto her wardrobe, continuing in her hair and under her chin. The person hidden next to her has no swirls. She’s painted with splashes of paint, bright and almost angry looking and it makes me think that perhaps her love is not only blind but raw too – hence the title piece Young Love. This person, blinded by the blue drapes, is also another shade of the clothing they wear. Maybe this is a stretch but the blues could symbolize love can feel blue sometimes – the blindness of love affairs.

Pieces that make me think are my favorite and just looking at the painting for one minute made me think of so many different intents. Are they being held back by love? Is the theme intimacy or sorrow? What are the woman’s eyes saying? Are they hugging each other or not? Just like the written pieces in each Élan edition, the artwork is also chosen with the intent of intimating the minds of our readers and pushing them to want to understand. To me, Élan means engaging the brain and this single art piece did that for me. This piece represents Élan with its colors and endless possibilities of interpretation. It invokes my interest just like each art piece in this book.

– Valerie Busto, Creative Non-Fiction/Fiction Editor

Grounding Myself in Art

Whenever I feel like I have come to a point where I have “run out” of things, ideas, themes, I turn to visual art to try and find inspiration. I do this thing where I am constantly writing about myself and what is happening in my life and, in turn, feel as if I am continuously writing about the same things over and over again in the same exact ways with the same exact language. It feels like I am stuck in my own writing.

Going to visual art allows me to disconnect my personal life from my writing and take on the voice of the subject or artist or to interact with something other than myself in my writing. I will write pieces that I would have never thought about writing or even thought of in general because of pulling my inspiration from something else, something intended to make the consumer feel some sort of visceral reaction.

Both writing and visual art make their consumers think and go further into each piece than what is first seen. It’s amazing. I can look at the same piece of art endlessly, but still continue to find something else about the it. There is always more.

Élan takes both art and writing and uses them so that a kind of symbiotic relationship occurs within the book itself. There is writing that has to do with the art and art that has to do with the writing. Each feed off the other.

In the 2017 Fall edition, an art piece titled, Fruit on Wheels III, is one that I find myself going back to consistently and doing nothing more than just looking at it and trying to piece together a semblance of the story of what is happening in it. Who are the two men? What are they doing? Where is it? Why was the artist drawn to capturing this moment in time? What did the artist want people to get out of it?

In all honesty, I am not entirely sure as to why I am drawn to this piece. There’s a story or something deeper lying in every piece of artwork, and I will most likely never truly know what the artist intended to say with this piece, but I can piece together what the art is telling me.

It tells me anguish and hard work and determination and exasperation and aspiration and just-getting-by and this-is-life-and-it-is-okay. I think it is partly because I am who I am and that I write what I write. I don’t do super crazy fiction stories or fantasy or abstract. I do grounded and realistic and in your face and there is more to what I am saying. That’s what I felt from this artwork. On the surface, you understand what is most likely happening, but you keep going further and further into the work itself and the smallest aspect of the art means something.

Writing from this piece would be me removing myself in the sense that maybe it isn’t a personal narrative that I am telling, but instead, someone else’s narrative that I am telling with personal conviction and connection.

– Winnie Blay, Junior Managing Editor