“Play a Song for Me”
By Celia Rabinovitch
I was born on the Canadian Prairies in the small town of Morden, Manitoba, not far from the American border and Hibbing, Minnesota, Dylan’s hometown. My father owned a dry goods store in an old establishment from 1910; the business my grandfather founded in the 1890s. He was a dedicated horticulturalist, volunteering at the Experimental Farm in the town. It wasn’t important then that we were the only Jewish family in town; we were part of the town and its personal mythologies. In 1929, at the beginning of the Great Depression, my father ran the store; living through the dirty thirties and the dust bowl. When hoboes came to town, he invited them to tell tales at the family table. This background placed me squarely inside Bob Dylan’s early world and the forthright way that he sang. Later I found out that Woody Guthrie and Sonny Terry and Leadbelly sang of these lonesome landscapes that I knew so well.
I heard Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man,” when I was fourteen. It expressed a desire for transcendence and called forth a mystical experience of the world. I memorized all of Blonde on Blonde; I wanted to reflect the mystery woman of “Visions of Johanna”; and searingly, “Stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again” expressed the desolation of our witty and troubled family. Like Dylan, I wanted out—thinking it was the Midwest, but it was more of being trapped by convention.
Hearing Dylan’s songs in the 1970’s drew me to American poetry, blues, and folk music. I traced a line from Ezra Pound’s Imagist poetry. That an image can crystallize an entire experience, a poetic epiphany in which time and space enfold upon one another—this moment became the visual epiphany that I seek in my art. You can find it in Edward Hopper, in Vermeer, in della Francesa, and in Eduard Munch. The Abstract Expressionists frame its impulses. It exists. The simplicity of the image spoke to me. Its multifarious associations seem prismatic. I drew the thread through Pound and Eliot to the French Symbolists like Nerval and Baudelaire, who influenced the luxurious poetry of Wallace Stevens, offset by the plainspoken images of William Carlos Williams. All of them relied on the image to provide meaning. From these bohemian aristocrats to the Beat Poets Jack Kerouac, Alan Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Bob Dylan, a stream of poets inspired my art from the beginning.
I select my images in themes, like writing a book or entering the folds of a cubist universe. I like to roll them in the mind to steep their different elements and moods. In my art I use color as mood, composition as energy, and sensual surfaces.
In the images here, I focused in these examples on images of the boat and water, the form against formlessness. The water is fluid and ever changing, like a state of mind. The boat also an image of passage, solitude, and of the soul transported over a crossing. Such images express a spiritual essence. Dylan’s songs have offered me a sense of visual poetry, magic, and of gritty realness that continues to fire my imagination.
