Poster Image
$20
Item#: 2015SYR16
Purchase Details
11x17-inches, printed on heavy weight (100-pound) Hammermill cover paper. We package each print with a piece of chipboard in a clear plastic sleeve.
You also receive…
An information page with photos of the artist and poet, and hand-written comments from each.
Medium- and large-format posters are available by custom order. Contact us for details.
Fireflies Blink Brightly
poster information
Description
Fireflies blink brightly
Caught in jars of summer dreams
Where I once left them.
Traditional haiku “rules” ask that certain elements such as “kigo” be included. Kigo translates as “season word,” a word which imparts an association with winter, spring, summer or fall. Free form haiku does not ask for this aspect, but I have always wanted to include kigo in my haiku.
For the Poster Project, I felt that there are different seasonal rhythms and moods any city such as Syracuse enjoys. Including a dreamy sense of summer appealed to me as a way to let readers return to an ethereal memory of childhood summers, capturing some fleeting summer light in a vessel of memory.
Combining visual art and a written art is a marriage of what all art should be.
Some of my best childhood memories are of catching fireflies. As a kid, one of my favorite things to do was catch fireflies at dusk with my sisters and our neighborhood friends. Once we caught them we would try to keep them in a jar, but we always ended up letting them go because they were so much more beautiful to watch in nature. I wanted to make the text and the fireflies look cohesive. I liked the idea of having them go up toward the sky, in a magical way. I thought silhouetting my figures would capture the feeling of catching fireflies. I used the trees to frame the sky and the children. I chose this poem because I knew I could do a really fun illustration with beautiful colors that a lot of people would connect with.