Selected poems
A painter's lament
They say the art of painting is dead
Not so say I
Just temporarily mislaid
Bright pixels dazzling, blinding the eyes and astonishing the senses
Vacant
But a distant memory lurks and the Elders still have something
to say
In the shadowy past
I recall Vermeer's assistant grinding the crude pigments made of minerals crushed by mortar and pestle
Bought from the Apothecary
A shopping list of madders, vermilion and weld
If you listen carefully, the sound of each colour can be heard,
The scrunch of each mineral discerned
Each cadence, a trace of its former life
A finer distinction
Relieved of its cumbersome form
it becomes lighter and mixes with white spirit like a cocktail blast of violets, mauves and ochres
Ground to a fine powder and wet with new life
When you look at a painting something of the creator's spirit is mixed with the paint
Traces everywhere if you can feel hard enough
There is a need for painters still in this rushed existence
Something shaped by hand,
Immediate, awake
the artists' touch, the artists mark
The deft short brushstrokes that convey the stiff feathers of an upright bird
Or a brocade of dying colours on an old worn sofa,
An accent of red that heightens the blow
KAPOW Roy Lichtenstein
The languorous swipe of the brush across the canvas as the artist departs the studio.
Thiebaud's iced cakes moistened with creamy white frosting made of a thick impasto spread with a buttery knife across its form
With random swirls and strokes of alternating candy pinks and middle greens
Vivifying the finer vital senses
Their vibration
Kandinsky's music stretches
the succulent paint oozing from its tube, reeking of linseed and turps dribbling towards an unpainted canvas
The luscious stripes of candy oranges and lemons coiled around a stick next to an imitation 18th century blue Chinese vase
A still life of colourful toys
Lent to the imagination on an oily cloth of
spattered blue specks and dots of white and yellow juxtaposed against the
haemorrhaging reds and crimsons bleeding with life dripping like a Pollock onto the darkened wood floor
A bloody mess
This artist's studio
I stand in the middle and all around me
the heady vapours of mineral turps
are Intoxicating
Bluebeard Incorporated
I hear Bluebeard's cutting up souls these days
An impressive graduate
A PhD in Butchery
severing and classifying
body parts invisible to the eye
He's even got the little guys onto it
They've got that same deadly glint in their eyes
waiting
Going in for the kill
They'll be the Master Builders of the next generation
Castles in the air
of the highest definition of course
Dazzling to the eye
A blinding of consciousness
their bodies relegated to service