This beautiful collection of poems and paintings is a collaboration between poet Donna Carnes and painter Jan Norsetter, who also created NAGC’s 2024 Christmas card. The book is soft cover, 8″ x 10″ and contains 61 poems and 61 paintings from all four seasons. It was conceived by Donna Carnes who wrote all of the poems and chose paintings from Jan Norsetter’s collection of paintings, both oils and gouaches.
Background
All About the Light, Poems & Paintings, is a collaboration between poet Donna Carnes and painter Jan Norsetter. The book was conceived by Donna Carnes and enthusiastically embraced by Jan Norsetter. Donna wrote all of the poems independently of Jan’s paintings and then selected pieces from Jan’s original oil paintings and gouaches to pair with her poems. The pairing of poem with painting is a process in itself, with the goal of putting two different types of art on one page, and through that deepening and enriching the reader’s experience.
Both artists grew up in the Madison, Wisconsin area, and share an Upper Midwest- Norwegian cultural background. Each has traveled widely, and their art emerges from the visual world around them. Donna’s poetry, which is set in the natural world, is also deeply shaped by her dreams, which are vividly visual, detailed, and long. Donna’s landscape poems are often wrapped in a dreamscape. An example of this is the poem Dark Light (p. 38), which was paired with Jan’s haunting nocturne painting, Super Moon.
Goals
When Donna and Jan started this book fifteen months ago, their goal was to write a short book of about thirty pages that paired poems and paintings full of the natural world. The wonder, melancholy, awe, and mystery of the changing seasons in nature and life are at the heart of the book. The book grew in length as Donna and Jan wove words and images into storied moments, with the combined poetry and painting vividly expressing some of our most fundamental feelings and experiences. The natural world is alive in poem and on canvas – ‘sunbeams fade’, ‘tall hemlocks sigh’. The moon appears again and again, casting its light ‘on dancing ice’ or ‘never-ending snowfall’. The Wolf moon and Super moon rise in moody and brilliant dream-fall sky.
Donna and Jan worked collaboratively with their graphic-designer Roy Sutcliffe to lay out the book. All About the Light is organized by season and leads the reader from winter-born spring through a year. The book is 80 pages long and contains 61 paintings and 61 poems. The authors each have a preference for winter light.
Jan Norsetter is an oil painter known for vibrant landscape paintings en plein air and evocatively detailed studies in still life. Norsetter also practices the decorative folk art of Norwegian rosemaling.
Donna Carnes is an imagist plein air poet. She writes in diverse poetic forms, which include freestyle, villanelle, pantoum, sonnet, and haiku.
$32.00
10 in stock
