Art & artists are a theme in my fiction and poetry

Art and artists are a theme in my fiction and poetry.

In poetry, it’s called ekphrastic. I’m working on an ekphrastic poetry collection titled The Artist’s House, inspired by my llongtime association with visual artists, musicians, dancers, and writers. My poetry and my novels often feature artists or a response to their work. It’s because I grew up with an artist father who painted constantly and invited many artists to our home and shared studios with them. He took us to working studios, local art exhibitions, and art museums in the Los Angeles area. More about my childhood with art and artists here.

The smell of oil paint and turpentine evokes these childhood memories and the wonder of a Saturday morning, watching my father mix oil paints and dash colors and shapes onto a white, gessoed canvas. In the mid-50s he painted these fishing boats at the dock in San Pedro, where we lived. It represented his passion for sport fishing. I loved the flaring spotlights, the night blues, and the way light and midnight blue meet and interpenetrate. My father’s time and focus on his art showed a lifelong devotion. Even as he eased into dementia, a brush was still in his hand. Once, in his basement studio, he confessed, “I don’t know how to mix paints anymore.” But he kept trying.

At the Easel with Alzheimer’s

My father is painting in the basement: blue,
green, yellow. The cinderblock wall’s white-
wash is tanned with dust and the ocean view
obscured by a flapping sheet of vinyl. It fights

the wind. He says he’s inspired to blue. My phone call
came to his studio and I was greeted: I know you.
You’re the pharmacist, right? The pall
on his memory has not dimmed his bad taste

in jokes or how at the easel he’s always affable
over the scribble of boar’s bristle, the give
of canvas to brush. I skip over laughable
lapses, as when he asks me where I live

and then pretends he was kidding. Name-
dropping, his mind grows patches, nicks
and spores like the salt on his aluminum
windows that will eventually make them stick.

Painting down there, his panes always closed
to keep it warm and dry, not a hint of sea
outside. What are you working on? His nose
nearly on the canvas, he can only say,

It’s getting better, going somewhere. It’s green,
blue, and not as grim as it sounds. His brain
grows lacy and colors squirm like the skeins
of yarn above the basement washing machine.

I’m frightened of how much he forgets,
this new breeze that unzips our history,
but I say, Don’t fight the wind. Be a net.
Catch the world by letting the knots slip.

First published in Fringe Magazine

Art in Your Daily Life

Art as part of daily life is a wonderful pleasure. I live in a community with a surplus of funds that they often devote to sponsoring new pieces of civic art. Most of it isn’t bad, and it’s a joy to browse a small town center full of sculptures and wall murals on a warm spring day. Art in museums is all well and good, but few see that art. This art, simpler and less exalted, can be seen on mechanical boxes and exterior walls, in parks and in plazas. We have towering sculptures in the city park and paintings on mechanical boxes. Where in some places graffiti artists skulk around at night to create, Walnut Creek invites locals to graffiti boarded-up storefronts with messages of unity and cheer.

 

An artist who makes his works literally from anything around him is Andy Goldsworthy. If you haven’t treated yourself to a documentary on his nature-based works, view Rivers and Tides on Youtube.

Self-Portrait by Andy Goldsworthy

One must have a mind of winter to regard the frost and the boughs
of the pine-trees crusted with snow – Wallace Stevens

He doesn’t appear to have a mind of winter,
this man handling shards of ice between
shaking gloves, tacking hewed splinters
together by flashlight. He has a keen
grasp of water’s arctic state. His stone
of a mind feels the light’s first crack
and dazzle through his muscle and bone.
He stakes his art on a pre-dawn slack
tide, hurrying an art’s punctilious making
for a sculpture sun’s full glory
will soon undo. But the camera, quaking,
again freezes art’s old story.
He rises satisfied with the dazzling rime.
A mind not of winter, but of time.

My Time Travel Novels About Artists

The Renaissance Club
Gian Lorenzo Bernini
Smarthistory’s short video on Bernini’s “David”

The Time Gatherer
Elisabetta Sirani
Heroic Baroque artist ahead of her time

Undoing Time
Patience Lovell Wright
Sculptor and spy

Jane Austen, Time Traveler
Jane Austen
Reader: “I have always sympathized with her lonely life. Never married as she refused the only proposal she ever received. Dying so young in her forties. Such a tragedy for the literary world. But this incredible time travel adventure repairs her sad life and projects Jane Austen into a far away future of 2024!”

 

The Timegathering Series is here. Adventure, love, art, and time travel.

Summertime Reading

In a small enclosed field near my condo, where I take my dog to ramble around, I read under a tree and sometimes write. Reading this way is simply heaven.What’s your next beach-read (or park-read)? If you haven’t stocked up yet, may I recommend my own newest, a road trip romance that will take you to exotic places in India, on a spiritual quest and a search for lasting love. He’s a musician and a songwriter who longs to make a career in music, and she’s in search of herself–or her real Self. Will their searchign paths keep them together?