David Hart UK
Signorelli
Original book title: Signorelli by Pietro Scarpellini
Much of the book was text and in Italian, so I have selected visual pages for photocopying
and working on, along with a brief verbal locating of it from a website.

The artist was new to me, much as I have admired other Italians from that period, and I became
rather daunted - or confused - as to what my 'point of view' might be, or why I was working on it.
I haven't at all wished to make fun of it - of which there was a real danger, of slipping into it in this
way - but I have thought to bring it into the age of photocopying, over-copying, and of scribble, of
visual and verbal interference. Or one might say we have inherited so much now, it gets into a mix:
book printing itself, and photocopying and re-copying, and it's too easy; yet this is where I am.

The religious aspect of the paintings is curious now, and I have avoided much of what the artist
may well have considered most significant and to him challenging. (My own churchgoing well
gone now). So the avoidance becomes itself a comment, an interpretation by omission.

What came to me as a thick hardback book is returned as a kind of office copy.

My own published work has been more verbal, poetry mainly; but I have done quite a bit by
way of poetry responding to visual works; I've worked with photography and have a parallel
life mostly privately of painting, montage, fun and games visually.

Although I have interfered radically with the book I was sent, I have held back on my urge to
interpolate much more (perhaps of my own photos, my own poems and artwork, and
images from elsewhere). I am instinctively a collector; doing this work for myself I'd have
collected more stuff into it; doing it for the present purpose it seemed better to do a rather
more limited response job, retaining at least the shadow of the original.

djhart11@mac.com
davidhartbirminghampoet.blogspot.com