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ARTS AND CULTURE

A painter's lament

  • 21 May 2018

 

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