Nicholas Karavatos 🖼️

Skimming the Surface of the Mind #3 #

Skimming the Surface of the Mind #11 #

Artist’s Statement #

With enjoyment, the poet […] photographs “from memory.” A photograph “happens in [his] imagination” and is “not the thing but the effect it produces.” As he is not a photographer “who copies nature,” a photograph of Nature is a “dream landscape, created from many different entities.” Color is an entity of light by shadow, and in […]’ photographs, the entities of color “give sensations which flow from” The Image, “from its own nature.” As a digital photographer, […] enacts beginner’s mind with his “systematic derangement of the senses” – this is the progression of contraries in his photography. “By intensifying all the colors” in the frames of referentiality, his rearranged photographs “arrive once again at quietude and harmony.”

Notes #

Paul Gauguin, from the manuscript Diverses Choses, 1896-97, Tahiti.

Paul Gauguin, letter to Amboise Vollard from Tahiti, January 1900.

Stéphane Mallarmé, letter to Henri Cazalis.

Paul Gauguin, from the manuscript Diverses Choses, 1896-97, Tahiti.

Arthur Rimbaud.

“Without Contraries is no progression.” William Blake, “Proverbs of Hell,” Marriage of Heaven and Hell. 1789.

Vincent van Gogh, letter to his sister Wilhelmina from Arles, March 30, 1888.

About the Artist #

Nicholas Karavatos was an assistant professor of poetics at the Arab American University of Palestine near Jenin in The West Bank. He was a U.S. Ambassador’s Distinguished Scholar to Ethiopia in 2018 at Bahir Dar University, and from 2006 through 2017, an assistant professor of creative writing at The American University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. At the Modern College of Business and Science in Muscat, Sultanate of Oman from 2001 through 2006, he was a senior lecturer in humanities. His first year as an expat worker was on the faculty of the Fujairah Technical School in the UAE from 2000 to 2001. Nicholas Karavatos is a graduate of Humboldt State University in Arcata and New College of California in San Francisco. He currently lives in Nairobi, Kenya with his wife and extended family.

Of his 2009 book No Asylum, David Meltzer writes: “Nicholas Karavatos is a poet of great range and clarity. This book is an amazing collectanea of smart sharp political poetry in tandem with astute and tender love lyrics. All of it voiced with an impressive singularity.”

Kevin Killian writes: “Nicholas Karavatos points out that there is ‘no asylum' anywhere, in a figurative sense, because even the parts of the world in most opposition to each other are bound up seamlessly in a net of shared reference, sensual pleasure, and invasive, sometimes assertive media. And misunderstanding. He is a prophet as well as a poet—maybe the canary we’ve sent down the coal-mine.”