Invitation to Vision

Phyllis Ammons recalls that her husband, A.R. (Archie Randolph) Ammons, painted in his study at 606 Hanshaw Road, Ithaca, New York, using her sewing table. It was the same room, she says, where he composed his poems, using his secondhand Underwood typewriter, bought while he was in Berkeley in the early fifties. With that machine he poured out words on paper, whether a sheet of typing paper or adding machine tape, often producing a finished poem in one sitting. And the typewriter, of course, produced its flow in standard, solid, repetitive, black-ink forms. As Ammons said: “I like the typewriter because it allows me to set up the shapes and control the space.... I need to lend a formal cast, at least, to the motions I so much love.” The watercolors were different.

When he began painting watercolors during Cornell University’s Christmas break in 1976, Ammons continued setting up shapes and controlling space, and through the process, he discovered that as “A Poem Is a Walk,” a painting is a “journey.” Both are actions, motions, with outcomes. He explains in Changing Things:

I’m sure I was attracted to the possibility of bringing together in one visual consideration the arbitrariness of pure coincidence with the necessity of the essential, the moving from the free, as the work of art begins, through the decisions of pattern and possibility, and into and through the demands of the necessary, the unavoidable, the inevitable. This “change” is in another form the oldest of journeys, that from exile to community.

As with the references to “shape” and “possibility” and “form” in his poem “Poetics,” Ammons’s watercolors embody his poetic concerns with particular shapes as manifestations of his vision: the line, the circle, the sphere, the triangle, the arc, the irregular “gourd-like, uteral, but also phallic,” 
renewing shape he “saw, as if in deep space.”

With brush or sponge or popsicle stick, Pelikan inks, and thick sheets of fine-quality Arches watercolor block paper, Ammons could dabble, experimenting with what he called a painting’s “mindfeel,” its colors, lines, shapes, motions, and events. He could stand above the paper, combining the inks with water, actively moving his body or the paper itself to release the motions of materials and find emerging shapes and forms. Through that 
process, Ammons says:

I began to feel what events on the paper “meant”—that is, I began to learn the joining of what happened on the paper to its emotional counterpart, the feelings generated and expressed by the events. I discovered that I was stirred by the thin, loud, and bright, the utterly blatant effect like a smack in the face, the anger felt, expressed, reacted to.

Phyllis Ammons says that he would show her his paintings, sometimes having made as many as five in one evening, and ask her for a response. She laughed that she had two: “I like it”/“I don’t like it.”

The twenty abstract paintings in the Poetry Foundation exhibit, A.R. Ammons: Watercolors (January 9–April 30), ten of which are included here, also invite response. They invite contemplation and imaginative interaction with Ammons’s vision.