beautiful patterns everywhere— my anxious eyes rest on shadows, running along edges and staring hard until the picture changes, gets defined, becomes blinding and then visible—
changed, altered, simplified,
I am calm once again
Simplified Shadows
Tag Archives: art
Windows, Visions and Flight
in the morning i stand at the window, the steam from my coffee makes me squint—
i think about windows, portals, visions of dreams, of flying
away and above and beyond what we know, through fields of corn and poppy
riding on the back of pick-up trucks to watch fireworks and feel alive again
Lately: In three parts
at night, we look at art; women with long dresses and ladders leaning on moons, curled up statues fight the
dark evening chill—fog rises from the damp leaves and seeps into our bones, into our exhaled breaths as we
contemplate unspoken questions, from unspoken conversations with dead poets and philosophers and husbands and wives
Lately
raccoons in midnight trees
flowers on tables
beautiful places and rambling thoughts
dark books and burning candles
morning sun rays wake the day
Thinking about things as I wandered the halls of a museum
i think of you a thousand times a day,
i think a thousand things
about the dreams sifted through time
and memory
and heartbeats—
lives running parallel
on this side of my own reality
and in the alternate realities of thousands
Late Spring
cardinals coming and going—flying through the slats on the little side porch, eating at the feeder, drinking in the fountain
a single peony shimmering in the morning sun
cups of orange spice tea on cool nights
family gatherings with pineapple popsicles
glasses of deep red wine into the night
cool linen sheets for afternoon naps
Wish
Questions for Mona Lisa
Are you actually smiling? And if so, what are you smiling at?
What have you seen in the eyes of a genius, in the bedrooms of kings, in the closet of thieves?
Are you Lisa del Giocondo, or the Virgin Mary, or are you a female Leonardo?
What happened to your eyebrows?
Do you miss traveling?
Why aren’t you wearing jewelry?
Do you think you are beautiful?
Are you lonely?
Lately in Images
Excerpt from the book: Vanessa Bell
Here, where the artist strives to shape, condense and order thoughts and sensations until they take on a form that communicates, is the promise of continuity as opposed to decay, of meaning as opposed to senselessness, of value as opposed to waste. Vanessa painted, not in order to forget anxiety and pain, but in order to transform them into the permanence of art.
Excerpt from the book, Vanessa Bell by Frances Spalding, 1983
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