Charles Hobson

250 Imaginary Waterfalls AP

 
10 x 10 x 1 in

The central idea for the design of this book is juxtaposing Joseph Goldyne’s intimate waterfall drawings with a line of poetry by Billy Collins. The effect is to offer the reader a way to find new insights in each.

Joseph Goldyne has been drawing and painting imaginary waterfalls for more than a decade. During the last several months of 2019 he made 250 small pen and ink wash drawings, each about two inches square on prepared sheets of watercolor paper. Each sheet measures 10 x10 inches and holds twenty-five debossed squares in a grid. Joseph filled ten sheets of this paper during the last six months of 2019 creating a total of 250 imaginary waterfalls. The purpose of his exercise was to explore how inspiring and infinite this feature of nature can be.

Billy Collins’ poem, Elk River Falls, pursues the same exploration. It was published in 2002 while he was Poet Laureate of the United States. It exemplifies his special ability to capture hidden textures in everyday moments and to transform them into extraordinary poems.

A new understanding of both the poem and the drawings is achieved by rotating a page with cut-out squares, a “mask,” over the images of twenty-five small waterfalls.

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