Cheryl Penn - A vispro journey.

It was a long journey to here, but now I am certain of the animal I am creating. I paint prose in a visual manner. I write layers and layers of prose over canvases up to 3m X 3m. Unfortunately they can’t be bigger because no linen is wider, and wooden frames distort, but ten, twenty, thirty layers of writing or making marks that look like writing, I write, and write and write. Further, I submit my own work as vispro having become frustrated with the term ‘vispo’ which seems too encompassing – a generic term to cover a multitude of textual creatures which no longer know why they are even on the textual visual plains – they’re just there, wondering exactly what they are – or not  - I’m often surprised by the indifference with which their inventors create and dispose of them. 

Layer 1: The Student.

I am a writer, but I am an artist too. Writing has consumed me since childhood. Whether it was the distraught pages of a teenage diary, the ravings of an early 20’s lunatic or prayers of despair – I have always written words – legible or illegible, it mattered not.  Then a stranger came knocking – except he was not a stranger – he was Animus to my Anima**. I knew it was a‘he’ because he was haunting and made it very clear - he was called the Nightcrosser. Without going into that further, he wanted to express himself in visual language and I had to marry the two. The resultant work was NOT vispo – it was most definitely  vispro  although I knew it not by that name at the time. The commonality was asemic writing – another tool I was not familiar with.

Layer 4: Further Sad Interactions.

Eventually the text is so interwoven and layered – a palimpsest of written layers, all heading to one point inspired by the simplicity of Giotto’s circle*.  During the last 5-6 layers, aesthetics take over in terms of mopping up the writing in order to bring all the layers of prose to a conclusion - something like the many

edits of a book before the final copy is produced. 

Layer 5: I Lost Something Precious - Have You?

But with this method, although it is concealed as all the sedimentary deposits in a landscape are, the work remains multivoiced, a physically deep, visual meta narrative of my private but revealed thoughts. The vispro eventually suggests a cyclical place of no particular event or solution, just the idea that all texts will eventually be their own ouroboros, no matter how executed or uttered. 

Layer 6: There as Never Ever to be Turquoise Light at the end of My Tunnel. 

Layer by layer, meaning is forged to represent the muli-complexities of my story - a chronological transition, sequential and sometimes detailing in excruciatingly close examination the vicissitudes of my life. But, it's not one alone - we all have stories, we are all the sum total of our ancestors - but I am ever moving onwards, forwards, towards the Light of the world I pray.