Helga Kos

In the land of ‘Virtual Reality’, who cares about copying the existing, material world onto a snip of paper or a rag of canvas. The painter, chasing reality like a true Don Quijote.
Perspective, how wonderfully a philosophical mistake. We have had enough, one should say, but the end is not yet there.The more painstakingly fiction resembles non-fiction, the more of reality does escape from the scene.
There are too many indefinable perceptions and too many significant images that cannot be digitalized, to ignore them. So I paint and, lately, print.

Book project 'Ode aan de Kolossale Zon' (Ode to the Colossal Sun).

From 1999 till 2004 helga Kos worked full-time on the designing and the printing of an extensive book. ‘Ode aan de Kolossale Zon’ an artist's book with cd, is based on Ned Rorem’s cycle of songs ‘Last Poems of Wallace Stevens’. It consists of 150 pages of graphical art. Within the book, as a graphical element, is incorporated the CD with ‘Last Poems’, performed by Wendingen.
Typography Josje Pollmann
Numbered and signed edition of 288.
Price 1500 Euro

How it came about
In 1997 Music Ensemble Wendingen invited me to adorn their performance of the ‘Last Poems of Wallace Stevens’ with an exhibition. The music and the poems evoked an overwhelming amount of images in my mind, much more than I could express in the gouaches and drawings for just this one exhibition. This inspired me to search for an art form truly reflecting the characteristics of music. I developed the idea for a book that doesn’t reveal its contents in one instant, but ‘over a period of time’. As in music, themes presented at the outset recur in due course. Through transparent and partly cut pages, certain images are already announced before they actually appear on the scene.
The book project started out in 1998 with a simple assignment from Wendingen by Marja Bon and Hans Woudenberg. They needed illustrations for the booklet that was to accompany their cd of the ‘Last Poems of Wallace Stevens’. But when they heard of my plans for an artist’s book, they welcomed it with great enthusiasm.

The artist’s book
'Ode aan de Kolossale Zon' was inspired by Ned Rorem's composition 'Last Poems of Wallace Stevens'. Sevens is regarded as one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. His enigmatic and, at the same time, extremely expressive poems often have as their theme the relationship between reality and imagination. My own ideas on this subject are akin to Stevens' and I felt challenged to attach a third, visual stratum to Stevens' poetry and Rorem's music.
I call 'Ode aan de Kolossale Zon' a CD-Artist's Book because it is an artefact inspired by music, comprising 150 pages of graphic works most of which were hand-printed (many at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam). It is produced in a limited, signed and numbered edition. The CD with Wendingen's performance of Rorem's composition constitutes an expressive element within the book.

Music, Poems, Book
Ned Rorem (1928) was inspired by the poetry of Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), whilst Stevens was inspired by the cubist painting of his contemporaries Picasso and Juan Gris. Now, in turn, Rorem's composition is the source of inspiration for a new work of art. 'Last Poems of Wallace Stevens' consists of nine sections which contrast strongly in timbre, time signature, tempo and rhythm. Soprano, cello and piano appear in many different combinations of importance.
Recurring musical themes connect the separate sections. In the book, I work with images in a similar way. It comprises three volumes which can be viewed side by side. This allows connections to be made between the different image themes recurrent in the three parts.

Stevens wrote the poems of 'Last Poems' at the end of his life. And though they are infused with the realization of ones own mortality, they are not so much about death as about the vitality of life. Only in the poem 'The River of Rivers in Connecticut' does he refer to it explicitly: 'There is a great river this side of Stygia...' (the river around the Greeks' Hades). For me, this poem occupies a key position within the cycle.
The music written by Rorem for these seven complex poems, though highly layered and diverse, should be seen as one composition. By including the CD with the book the viewer is enabled to simultaneously experience three disciplines -visual image, text and music.
Almost all of my work is also about simultaneity, about the concurrent existence of different realities: that of actuality, of memories and fantasies and that of the manifestations of others. The artist's book is an autonomous work. But the inclusion of the CD enables a deepening of the 'viewer's' experience and so lead him into the stratification, complexity and musicality of this inter-disciplinary project.

Why a Book
I was searching for a specific, logical form for a work that was inspired by music. One experiences a book not at one glance but by leafing through it. Music also does not give a complete impression instantaneously, but reveals itself 'in time'. In a book, the images on the separate pages can influence and supplement each other. It was a surprise to discover how many new ways a book offers to process complex images.
My intention with this CD-Artist's Book is that the pages should not exist solitarily. They should not be separate graphic sheets, but acquire their meaning in relation to each other. The image changes by turning the pages. After-image and transparency play an important role in this. To emphasize this, I have frequently chosen thin paper, transparent paper and Japanese paper as well as 'fat' printing techniques such as linonoleum-cut and stencil. 'Smut' and 'show-through', traditionally a printer's nightmare, were consciously sought techniques.