From a young age my first love was art and I was lucky enough to study at what was then Leeds College of Art, with, among others, Robin Page, a member of the FLUXUS group, and Jeff Nuttall, author of Bomb Culture. Ian Duhig’s poem ‘Dancing Stars’ is a memorial to the Northern surrealist artist Anthony Earnshaw, ‘an artist, writer, aphorist, he also wrote poems – /one pinned to his engineering works’ notice board got him sacked/which any poet would be proud of’. I love his Seven Secret Alphabets – letters contorting, transmogrifying into clock hands, nails, smoke, rabbits ears, the arms of a compass and so much more.
In his poem ‘Occupational Exposure’, Oscar Mather evokes Goya, who ‘suffered from saturnism, causing him colic, vertigo, hearing loss and violent depressive episodes’, known then as ‘painter’s madness’ and caused by lead in paint. ‘In Goya’s work, whites and reds are no longer just bone and blood, but a painter’s slow death.’
After watching At Eternity’s Gate, a biographical drama about the final years of Van Gogh‘s life, Steven Hollander began to read Van Gogh’s letters to his brother, resulting in the poem ‘Dear Brother’, which consist of seven self-portraits:
The old man soaking
in cracking embers
is not real either. It’s me, limp, blue
covering myself – it’s over
not life, just the hope of being
an old man by a fire without
paints by his side.
JP Seabright became obsessed, she says, with the artist Barnett Newman, one of the major figures of Abstract Expressionism. The title of his painting, Who’s Afraid of Red Yellow and Blue?, influenced by the Edward Albee play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, was slashed three times:
I walk the wire
between insanity and addiction
metamorphing myself into the liar
that’s found a truth in Barnett’s benediction
of colour and formless shape and size
a blank expanse for one hundred million
cheap at the price for oblivion’s prize (The Zip)
The wandering imagination of James Sutherland-Smith takes him through the streets of Prešov and the tunnel of the Florianka gate, beneath a ‘delicately coloured’ dilapidated fresco by Max Kurth:
a barefoot girl with black eyebrows
leading her little sister
through a meadow with red poppies.
The fresco is beyond restoration.
I’ll leave you with an excerpt from John Freeman’s poem ‘A Picture Postcard from Heaven’:
(. . . ) memory will keep, like picture postcards
of great paintings seen on walls of galleries,
everything except what’s been most precious.
Neuroscience has just caught up, I’ve read,
with what some of us have always known: the brain
is altered by seeing masterpieces
in a way no print or screen can replicate.
Linda Black