Visual artists Lisa Rosato and Whitney Riley are called Band of Artists because they see themselves like a musical band working in unison. They create the same painting together, sometimes including guest artists, painting simultaneously on a single canvas layering shape, line and color. Collaboratively, they  intuitively interpret words into paint. 

 

Each artist interprets the poem visually—a reverse ekphrastic process. Ekphrasis (art about art) is a concept dating back thousands of years where a new form of art offers a deeper understanding to the original work of art. Poets and writers often use this concept in their work; however, it is less known in the reverse form.  

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Using poetry to create together is an incredible experience. It's profound looking back and knowing that these images would never exist without all of the life that was filtered through the poet into each poem. Both art forms link logic and structure to capture the fluidity of emotion, which is never permanent state. 

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The mission of this project, which began honoring the poems of our dear friend Paul Otremba, is creating an immersive storytelling experience. Throughout the website you can view each painting while listening to a reading of its corresponding poem. Just click through. We hope you enjoy!

 

Want more information about Ekphrastic art? The following is a snippet taken from the Ekphrasis Wikipedia page, April 24, 2022:

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Ekphrasis has been considered generally to be a rhetorical device in which one medium of art tries to relate to another medium by defining and describing its essence and form, and in doing so, relate more directly to the audience, through its illuminative liveliness. A descriptive work of prose or poetry, a film, or even a photograph may thus highlight through its rhetorical vividness what is happening, or what is shown in, say, any of the visual arts, and in doing so, may enhance the original art and so take on a life of its own through its brilliant description. One example is a painting of a sculpture: the painting is "telling the story of" the sculpture, and so becoming a storyteller, as well as a story (work of art) itself. Virtually any type of artistic medium may be the actor of, or subject of ekphrasis. One may not always be able, for example, to make an accurate sculpture of a book to retell the story in an authentic way; yet if it is the spirit of the book that we are more concerned about, it certainly can be conveyed by virtually any medium and thereby enhance the artistic impact of the original book through synergy.

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In this way, a painting may represent a sculpture, and vice versa; a poem portray a picture; a sculpture depict a heroine of a novel; in fact, given the right circumstances, any art may describe any other art, especially if a rhetorical element, standing for the sentiments of the artist when they created their work, is present. For instance, the distorted faces in a crowd in a painting depicting an original work of art, a sullen countenance on the face of a sculpture representing a historical figure, or a film showing particularly dark aspects of neo-Gothic architecture, are all examples of ekphrasis.

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“Ekphrasis.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation,  21 March 2022, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ekphrasis