User:Leilaphilip14/WaterRising

Water Rising
Water Rising tells the story of a collaboration between award-winning author Leila Philip and internationally known sculptor, Garth Evans. Philip’s realist poems are set amongst Evans’ abstract watercolors, to create a book celebrating the relationship between painting and poetry.

Background/Inspiration
For twelve months, Garth Evans, known for his exploration in sculpture, turned to making watercolors, while Leila Philip, known for her work in literary nonfiction, worked in a lyric mode. They agreed to wait until each had produced a body of work before they shared the outcome, without discussing the works while they were in progress. At the end of a year they brought their works together and selected the twelve watercolors and eleven poems that now make up the collection. Once the works were set side by side, the artists were intrigued, delighted and amazed by the power of art to translate across genres. Placed next to the poems, the watercolors began to speak to those texts, while the poems, read before the watercolors, powerfully informed ways of looking at the images.

Experienced together, the poems and watercolors interact. At its core, Water Rising is a work of collaboration between a visual artist and a writer. In challenging themselves to create works outside of their usual practice, Philip and Evans created a book that explores the ways in which we locate ourselves in a world rapidly changing.

The watercolors were produced in artist Garth Evans' studio, which looks out at the woods in Woodstock, CT. The poems, which explore ordinary landscapes as a means of insight, delight and self-awareness and were also made in Woodstock, CT.

Mission
The authors hope the book, together with music composed by Shirish Korde, generates conversations about and support for environmental stewardship. Art has played an important role in the preservation of the American landscape and the authors' hope for this project is that it will draw upon that history to challenge and inspire audiences to a greater awareness of and discussion about our relationship to our rural spaces.

At its core the book has environmental themes and celebrates a sense of place. 100% of net proceeds from the sale of the book are given to organizations working to preserve the beauty and natural resources of New England, especially in Northeastern Connecticut, where the work was made.

Praise for Water Rising
In Water Rising, an intimate collaboration between Leila Philip and Garth Evans, poet and artist, a way of “speaking and singing” rises out of the trust each has placed in the other’s mastery of their medium. This shared faith elaborates in subtle ways the brilliant and distinctive gifts—one descriptive, the other abstract—of their aesthetic temperaments. The result is a stunning and surprising marriage of true minds.

-- Michael Collier, The Ledge

In this exquisite collection, Water Rising, the sublime watercolors of Garth Evans and the lyrical meditations of Leila Philip reflect those tides that rise and course within our lives and through the natural world, in both cases tracing the indelible watermarks that have been left behind. Whether grounded in our intimate daily experience or our artistic hopes and desires, the paintings and poems of Water Rising celebrate our insistence that, in the face of much darkness, we will continue to live along the shores of light and great beauty.

-- David St. John, Study for the World's Body

The silent sound that Leila Philip's poems make on the page is reciprocated by the beautiful articulations of color and form that are Garth Evans' watercolors. Things happen, the poems and paintings both tell us. How and why are mysteries and should remain so, but the happenstance of the art forms, acknowledges a persuasive, crucial gravity -- open-minded souls at their careful work.

-- Baron Wormser, Poet Laureate of Maine, 2000-6

The paintings and poems of Garth Evans and Leila Philip “in-form” us, in the deepest sense, of what it is to live alongside, in relationship with, the structures and lives around us. In Water Rising, the ancient argument over which is superior—painting or poetry—is quieted at last. For here, whether taking form in image or in words, the zucchini rise like “zeppelins”: “the surprising weight/ of them lifting/ my basket.”

-- Angie Estes, winner of the 2015 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award

Water Rising is a marvelous collaboration between an artist and a writer, in which lines and colors and words blend and merge to celebrate a small corner of the world. Garth Evans and Leila Philip teach us how to see a place anew, “as if a secret were breaking open.” And now that we know the secret, which is that every place demands love and attention, nothing will ever be the same again.

-- Christopher Merrill, The Trees of the Doves

Water Rising is a book whose exquisite individual voices—its poems and watercolors—harmonize like wild singers in a healthy natural landscape. These threads of color and song weave a pattern of music the likes of which has not quite been heard before, a music simultaneously wild and domesticated, cooked and raw, improvisational and carefully notated, a music to be seen as well as simply heard. Although they worked separately, these two singular artists, deeply connected as human beings, have achieved a true collaboration here: this book is larger than the sum of its parts, deeper than the visions of its individual artists. This is collaboration as the best kind of marriage is collaboration: something beyond either life is made real here, made manifest. The book itself is a work of art, not a mere collection of artifacts. As such, it is truly a small miracle, a refuge for contemplation, the real world shown as magic, full of wonder and delight, and precious beyond our mere knowing.

-- Michael Hettich, Systems of Vanishing

In their gorgeous creation, Water Rising, Leila Philip and Garth Evans present a way of working, a method of living, and an artist's model of how to shape-shift between intimacy and independence. I'm struck by the black and white power of the words (buildings and dwellings unto themselves) and the tender viscera of the paintings' extraordinary color and movement. And, too, how the poems lend shape to beloved terrain, while the paintings enact poetic knowing. Both forms move deftly between their own inner and outer dimensions and together maintain a sustained and passionately engaged conversation. -- Lia Purpura, On Looking

Leila Philip's poems are intricately accurate about the look and sound of natural things, the grand sweep of the seasons, and the elusively textured emotions that unite two people in a single enterprise. She is a particularly subtle kind of realist. Garth Evans, a non-figurative sculptor, is seen here as a watercolorist transposing the grand forms of his three-dimensional work to the flatness of paper. Her representations and his abstractions do not, at first glance, seem to have much to do with one another. With attentive reading and looking, however, we begin to perceive in his imagery intimations of specific things--qualities of light, shifting structures of space--and, in hers, openings onto vast, unnamable matters of hope and the flow of time. Each is as much an abstractionist or a realist as the other, and Water Rising joins their work in a magnificent unity.

-- Carter Ratcliff