Venice at Dawn – Photo from Pinterest
sinews of city
in the hour of sunrise
find veneration
From my books City of Pawns and Riverthink
Painting
All posts tagged Painting
“The Burning Giraffe” by Salvador Dali
flights of deconstruct
reconstruct fancy
fantastical visions
dismembered familiar
atrocities masked of
their outrage composed
revolutions of images
straddling the gap
between dreams
and reality raising up
visual voices that clang
in the ear of the eye
prima facie absurdity
shot through with
uncontrolled rational
politics viewpoints
exempt from esthetical
colloquy lifting the work
off its page off its canvas
to float on provocative
currents of thought
unforgettable statements
the art of anarchic
surprise using juxtaposed
features of chaos as
message and medium
From my books Ephemera and Legacies (vol. 2)
Portrait by Tim Mueller
pale blue lines
outline blotches
the shapes and
the shadows of
life by the numbers
faint color codes
cover the mass
produced canvas
designed to create
one more mass
produced portrait
with pigments that
daub and dress
mutual features
of character
common to crowds
save for moments
infrequently fresh
here and there
now and then
when a self-minded
painter flips over
the art board and
makes of its sheer
daunting blankness
a brave handed
bold colored vision
a one-of-a-kind
most remarkable life
From my book Ephemera
“Sunrise, Le Havre” by Claude Monet
broken impasto
caught on candid natural light
more essence than edges
(originally posted April 2013)
“Pentimento” by Mickey Cunningham
gestured apologies
scratch at ill-spoken
impasto on canvas
first brushed by
pure heartstrokes
with lush lusty colors
now dulled beneath
layers of life wanting
clemency knowing
not how to reveal
vibrant passions
from under smeared
rancor built up
by dismay not
with she who sat
model in full bloom
of youth but with
he the self-loathed
and failed artist
who never could
capture that singular
moment again
(originally posted April 2013)
“Purple Moonlight” by Sneddonia
which colors obtain
grueling portraitures of pain
black on purple serves
agonized canvasses well
slashing eyes with sharp edges
(originally posted December 2013)
“Picture of Dorian Gray” by Ivan Albright
at its best
a mere
captured
thin moment
in time
a slice of a slice
of a sliver of life
unrevealing
embellished
and not
to be trusted
for nothing
of truth is
portrayed
but for one
sure exception
when artist
despises
the subject
(originally posted January 2014)
“The Round Up” by Charles Marion Russell
(Regarding Charles Marion Russell)
Red cloudlets of trail-dirt plume upward from under
Hard galloping hooves of a fifteen-hands paint,
Their noise all but drowned in the rumbling thunder
Of stampeding longhorns, escaped of restraint
A river of beef streaming headlong apace
Over featureless ground, relentless, severe,
But with breathtaking vastness of wide open space
Marking Manifest Destiny’s western frontier
The rider, secure in a high-cantle saddle,
Works deftly with rein and spur, urging more speed,
While flailing his misshapen hat like a paddle
Against rippling flanks of his muscular steed
His neckerchief flies, a white throat-knotted rag,
Its corner tails flick at his leathern, seamed face
Expressive of strain in each masculine crag,
As he struggles to turn this tumultuous race
Neat coils of lasso bounce, slapping hide chaps,
As this veteran workhorse responds, well in tack,
To its handler who’s hell-bent for brake to collapse
This feral momentum, then drive the herd back
Back to the route, that reliable trail bed
With adequate waters where wild grasses stand,
That leads to the auction pens staged at the railhead
To stockyards that nourish this young hungry land
The background is filled by a purpling sky,
Where a lowering sun shoots bright lavender streaks
Across orange-brown mountains whose distant and dry
Treeless contours stand capped by time-flattened peaks
The foreground presents a stray bull with a blaze,
Tripped hoof-over-horn by brush brambles of sage,
It thrashes about with a frantic-eyed gaze
In the sorrowful throes of sheer fear and raw rage
Implausibly, all of these primitive tensions,
This spirited energy, power, and sweep
Of motion in all of its active dimensions
Are caught, oil on canvas, forever to keep
A slice of life verging on violence, dense
With realism laid on with masterful stroke
Conveying the rowdy exuberant sense
Of America’s story that cowboys evoke
(written in my youth but first posted here June 2013)
“Fantastic Forest” by Hyatt Moore
triplet chestnuts
hide like hulking impostors
among ancient elms
awaiting the painter’s brush
to complete their deception
Leonardo Da Vinci – Self-Portrait
(Originally posted June 2013)
bastard prodigy
inhaled practical genius
from medieval airstreams
fulsome with hardship
and history blown
from far corners
of violent worlds
across fallow Tuscany
stirring the intrigues
seething in Florence
precocious esthesia
charged candlelit studios
in tour de force thrall
to Medici patronage
painted and sculpted
invented machines
designed revolutions
of science and art
engineered his modernity
prefigured our future
Poesy plus Polemics 