Vision of the Questing Knight

the fisher king
relaxed and triumphant
his line slack
drifting on calm waters
as the golden one
who holds the Grail
blesses the Holy Lance
with her moist lips

Your Gyant God

adapted from Baudelaire's The Giantess, tr, by R.Howard

had you been there

when primal nature teemed

with monstrous progeny

you would have tried

to nest beside

some gyant god

the way that cats

sprawl at the feet

of those who feed them.

loving to watch him breathe

you would see his lower arm

grown tremendous

with his terrible games.

and you would study

rain-clouds forming

in his darkening eyes

to know what thunders

gather'd in his heart.

scaling the slopes

of his enormous legs

you saunter through

the landscape of his lap.

and when fetid summer

makes him stretch

across the lands

you will sleep, untroubled

in the shadow

of his arm--

a peaceful homestead

at the mountain's base.

Painting at last!

There comes a time in life when a person had to do what she or he has to do. For me, this is painting.  I have wanted to paint since I was in high school....more than 30 years ago.

This painting shows the city of Derbent in the Caucasus.  It is after an engraving of the city in the Yule-Cordier Marco Polo (Dover Edition).  The calpih Harun al-Rashid, ruler of most of the civilized world, visited this strategic place, standing at the frontier of his vast realm.

The city lies open to the sea.  The rolling hills are the body of the earth.  The one who has arrived, the so-called great one, is a small but important figure heading into the midst of the city.  he has past the entrance and proceeds into the depths of this ancient place.

The jetty and the boat linger at the entrance, but the caliph reaches the interior.  His presence will cause a chain reaction, the will engender new life into this once forgotten town.

Overhead, far from the concerns of men, two birds float serenely over the whole scene, oblivious to the concerns of humans.

"Auch euer denkin wir, ihr Thale des Kaukasos,
So alt ihr seid, ihr Paradiese dort
Und deiner Patriarchen und deiner Propheten"

                                     ~Am Quell der Donau, Friedrich Holderlin

Van Gogh in Philadelphia

The Philadelphia Museum of Art recently exhibited almost 50 paintings from van Gogh's final, and most productive phase of his career as a painter.  In the reproductions that I have seen, his paint seems so thick, and his brush strokes so clear, that the paintings come to life off of the canvas and into the viewer's reality.  As a beginning painter myself, I felt that I just had to see them up close and in the real, to find out what he had done.

My friend Mike R. generously offered to drive us down to Philadelphia, as I could never have made the trip alone.  Before our time to view the exhibit, we wandered in the 1500-1800 gallery wing.  There the paintings, in spite of giving three dimensional appearances, were, for the most part, flat medium on a canvas.  What made van Gogh stand out so?  I had taken a class in Italian Renaissance Art in college, in which we discussed the various methods used at that time, but nothing I had seen from that time in painting seemed comparable to this exhibit.

I did find out, however, that there were rules about getting too close to the paintings.  I had so wanted to see them with my naked eye, and to do that, I had to get within a few inches of the canvas.  At least I was able to see a few up close before I was warned away, and it was enough.  Now, how had he done it? and how had he been able to paint so many in the space of just two to three years?  At home, I looked it up on Wikipedia, and discovered his method.  IMPASTO, or using the paint as a paste on the canvas.  Moving rapidly, finishing in one "sitting," van Gogh swept broad areas of color onto the canvas, and then worked on detail with a smaller brush and different shades of color to give the three dimensional effect.Upon trying this method myself, I immediately discovered the value of brushes with a curved end....to keep the areas of color from mixing too easily and promiscuously.