1. The "Starting Point" of Chaos: You’ve said that you don't draw or sketch; instead, you put colors on a palette, spread them into a "mess" with a knife, and wait until you "see something" in the abstraction. This sounds remarkably like the "First Thought, Best Thought" school of poetry. Is this process of finding a shape in the mess an act of painting, or is it an act of translation—finding a message that was already waiting for you in the colors?
ANSWER: I look at my empty palette and then I decide which colors I want to use. I then put those colors onto the palette and take the knives to bring the canvas to life. I truly love vibrant colors and vivid contrasts. I think finding a shape in “the mess” is an act of inspiration from a different realm of unreality. Most paintings I never really know how they will end up looking, in fact sometimes it’s like some other essence is painting them instead of me.
2. The Ancestry of the Pen: Every great poet stands on the shoulders of giants. As someone who has spent decades exploring the rhythmic and lyrical depths of the English language, who are the poets you return to when you need to recharge your own spirit? Do you find their "voices" or their philosophies echoing in your mind when you are standing before a blank canvas?
ANSWER: I return to my favorite poets time and again which are: Shakespeare; Michael Drayton; Edward Dowson; William Blake T.S. Eliot; Fred Cogswell; W.H. Auden and many more, but too many to list. Sometimes I type a sentence into google and ask what poem this is in.... sometimes no answer, but sometimes a jackpot and I find a new poet I had never heard of before. I check it out and sometimes I really like the poem and the poet and if so, I then search for more works by that poet. It’s sort of like finding a shiny Gold coin in a sea of Copper pennies.
3. Inspirers and Turning Points: Versatility like yours—spanning poetry, music, and painting—often requires a catalyst. Looking back at your creative career, who or what played the most pivotal role in inspiring you to become a versatile poet-artist-musician all at once? Was there a specific mentor or event that helped you realize these were not three separate lives, but one singular expression?
ANSWER: POETRY: Fred Cogswell of Fiddlehead Poetry Books, University of New Brunswick, Canada was the first person to accept my poetry for publication and he published a 100 page book of my poems back in 1979. Truly, his belief in my work was a catalyst to me not only continuing to write, but believing in myself and my poetry. MUSIC:– My mother, my dear old mother, God rest her soul, made me take piano lessons and organ lessons for 8 years learning to read and play music and learning the theory of music. After I no longer had to take lessons, I really didn’t bother much with music, but in later years the music lessons early in life stood me in good stead when I switched to guitar and singing and playing by ear in bands professionally. When playing in a band we sometimes had to include afternoon jam sessions on a weekend and when someone came up and wanted to sing a song I was not familiar with, I could more or less figure the chord changes of the song by knowing the theory of music and the number system. Regarding PAINTING: I started painting when I saw a blurb in a local community magazine that said “If you think you’d like to paint come to our drop-in and try it.” So, I did in 2012 and have continued enjoying that aspect of my personality with extreme joy. To pick up a palette knife and put colors on canvas with no idea of where it will lead me is always such a joy to see the finished painting once it has taken shape and been completed. I am quite a prolific painter: I paint 3-5 paintings a week generally in the space of about 5 hours. I feel so blessed to be able to paint, paint, paint and then ... paint some more!
4. The Geometry of the Mind: You mentioned that you can't "copy" or "sketch," and that everything comes from "mind visualizations." In your poetry, you’ve mastered the "geography of the soul." When you close your eyes to visualize a painting, do you see literal images, or do you see cadences and emotions that eventually clothe themselves in color?
ANSWER: This is a hard question to answer, but I will try my best. Everything does come from my mind when I paint, but I only visualize what I see happening on the canvas which enters my mind and revisualizes itself and I try to get the revisualizion back onto the canvas as I “feel” it in my mind. I don’t really see the visualizations, I feel them in my soul and they come to life through my hands and knives.
5. Ekphrastic Healing: The Gift of Art: You have a beautiful and generous habit of giving paintings away to poets so they can "take the painting home" after writing a poem to it. This creates a living cycle of inspiration. Do you feel that a painting is truly "finished" when you put the palette knife down, or is it only completed when another poet breathes a new, written life into it?
ANSWER: This is a very good question and a double barrelled one at that. When I finish the painting it is finished for me. When the painting has someone bring more life into it with their words and vice-versa the painting births new words into the poet’s mind, then the living cycle of inspriration has completed another lap on the track of art’s dream which is continuously static and yet forever changing. Everything is interconnected on some level of being whether ethereal, real, or both in consecutive unison. If that seems a little hard to understand. I can commiserate as I find it hard to understand myself.
6. The "No-Lesson" Philosophy: By never taking a lesson in painting, you’ve preserved a very raw, "primitive" purity in your visual work. However, poetry and music often have strict structures (meter, rhythm, key). Does your "self-taught" approach to painting feel like a holiday away from the formal "rules" of poetry, or do you find yourself unconsciously applying a musician's sense of "time and tempo" to your palette knife?
ANSWER: This is the most difficult question to answer but I will attempt to answer it. For me the only poetry that I adhere to its rules are Shakespearian Sonnets and Traditional Haiku. Everything else, I just do it as I feel it at the moment I am writing a poem. I never have been one to follow strict rules or structures. I just sit down with a pen or a knife and write or paint what comes from my mind at the time. I feel fortunate as I can write a poem quite quickly. I just start with one line and once I write that one line down all the rest just start flowing out of the pen or if I’m at the computer, then out of the fingers onto the keyboard into a poem. Regarding the musician’s sense of time and tempo.... I fell that many times in my poetry, but never in my palette knife or when I’m painting.
7. Spiritual Synesthesia: For a musician and poet, "cadence" is everything. When you look at your paintings on the Silver Bow website, can you "hear" them? If one of your recent acrylics were a song or a chord, would it be a soaring anthem or a deep, bluesy vibration?
ANSWER: To be honest, when I look at my paintings I never hear them, but I seem to move to a different plateau of being when I look at them. It sort of feels like I am looking inside myself and all the different aspects of myself and my other selves that I may be interacting with on a different level of spiritual vibration. When I look at my paintings I am so grateful to the universe for giving me the ability to create paintings. I look at my paintings and I feel happy, blessed and filled with love. Regarding songs I might be thinking of when I’m painting No soaring anthem, no deep bluesy vibration, If I were to think of a song while painting it would be either a medium tempo country shuffle Faron Young song like “Step Aside” or “Wine Me Up” or “Twin Fiddles” with a predominant drum beat, a prevalent bass guitar holding down the bottom end and a full country band including steel guitar, electric guitar, violin and piano. Or it could be a rock’n’roll song like Electric Light Orchestra songs “Rock’n’Roll is King” or “Don’t Bring Me Down”; or a Roy Orbison song like “In Dreams” or “Lana” or “Blue Bayou”; or torch jazz songs by Della Reese like “And That Reminds Me” or “And the Angels Sing” or “Someday”; Or some good old Al Jolson songs like “Swanee” or Rosie You Are My Posie”or “When the Red Red Robin Comes Bob Bob Bobbin’ Along; or Frankie Laine’s signature song “That’s My Desire” I absolutely love Della Rees and Al Jolson and Frankie Laine. And one of my absolute favorites is Nat King Cole singing what I consider to be the greatest song ever written “Stardust”.
8. The Universe’s "Mysterious Ways": You’ve spoken about the spiritual hand in your life. When you are scooping up a color on your palette knife, do you ever feel a "nudge" from a higher power to pick up a blue instead of a red, or is the spiritual connection something that only reveals itself after the mess is already on the canvas?
ANSWER: I don’t think much about anything else but painting when I’m painting. I really get into the zone. I usually start with a combination of colors on the palette. Always there is black and there is white on my canvas because I never mix paints to get a color, if I want it darker I add black. If I want it lighter I add white..... once I’ve added the black or the white, I may add another darker shade or lighter shade of the actual color I am working with (a primary color such a blue or red). but I never mix primary colors to get another color. If I want orange, or pink or turquoise or purple, I buy a tube of the color I want. If I change the color at all it will just be by adding black or white to it. Regarding the spiritual connection: Truthfully I never know when the spirit is not present. It seems to be near me constantly. I know it is there and it is part of me and I am happy about that as I move the colors about and together the spirit and I birth a new living breathing creation.
9. Curating the Soul at Silver Bow: As a publisher, you look for spiritual and intellectual depth. Now that you are a visual artist, has your "eye" for manuscripts changed? Do you find yourself looking for writers who—like your paintings—start with a "beautiful mess" and manage to pull a profound truth out of it?
ANSWER: As a publisher, I try to feel the soul of the writer as I read the words that came from his or her soul. Everything begins as a thought and then outpictures itself into some sort of reality, written, engineered, built, painted, etc. All thought is a living thing creating and outpicturing itself into reality. As a publisher reading a manuscript, I look to feel the soul of the writer in the words. It is almost as if some manuscripts breathe beautifully and some choke and stumble and stutter and can’t be brought to proper fruition. The most rewarding thing as a publisher is when I read a manuscript filled with soul and spirit and I feel like I am taken to a new and heady realm of existence even if only for a short while. It feels like spending time outside of the structure of time. It is a beautiful feeling of euphoria as the words electrify my synsapses.
10. The Poet’s Eternal Frontier: You’ve mastered the "Mind Visualization" in art and the "Public Voice" as a Poet Laureate Emerita. If you were to write one definitive poem that captured the essence of your journey through music, verse, and color, what would be the title and very first line? Where is the poet in Candice James heading next?
ANSWER: The Title would be “Flying through Myself” The line below would be the very first line which I have come up with just now: “I lift my soul once again to the periphery of the dream I am ─ ” I must admit I wrote the first line then the title but once I wrote the first line the title just came to me immediately out of the blue.
ANSWER: The Title would be “Flying through Myself” The line below would be the very first line which I have come up with just now: “I lift my soul once again to the periphery of the dream I am ─ ” I must admit I wrote the first line then the title but once I wrote the first line the title just came to me immediately out of the blue.
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