The Likeness

by Arthur Gregor

How can you live, how exist

without assurance of

or at lest the memory of

someone, something

fantastic, marvelous

always behind you,

a hand, grip on your shoulder,

a presence surrounding you

as a shell surrounds what lives inside?

Song closer to you than flutter of wings!

Word more antique than age!

Without it -- call it intimacy,

your intimate connection --

how do you stand vis-a-vis

the multiplicity of things,

a tree, fence, grass, person in your path?

Unless you find in them

that quality no one defines,

how do you love, what do you

whisper, what song

do you share in the dark?

Without it I am as someone

lost from his caravan,

a sandstorm whipping him,

someone out to find him on a frozen sea,

man alone on a waste of ice

imagining, as the vast and hazy

emptiness absorbs him,

a tattered though victorious

humanity coming toward him,

soldiers linking arms,

a populace with banners

singing and beating drums.

Without it

I am cut off.

I await its sound.

I ravage memory

for sight of it, its melody.

I shape with bare

and desperate hands

its likeness in myself.

Chapunga Stone Sculpture

I am so in love with the Chapunga Stone Sculptures from Zimbabwe I will show them in two segments because I don't want to leave anything out. The sculptors use an assortment of stones, they often leave areas of the stone's natural outer layer combining it with intricately textured areas and highly polished areas.  I have no words to describe how these sculptures move me, there is a poignant beauty about them, combined with enormous strength and beauty of human dignity.

Listening To My Baby Kick

Coming of Age

The End of Hope

Protected by Our Spirits

Counterintuitive

I had dinner with some friends recently and the conversation turned to words - the use and abuse of the English language. We acknowledged that various words and phrases pop up in our culture. They seem to appear out of nowhere, and suddenly we see them everywhere.  It started with “counterintuitive.”  Out came the dictionary. Counterintuitive: contrary to intuition or to common-sense expectation (but often nevertheless true). It’s an adjective but most people use it as a noun.  I’m still not sure what it means.

I then came up with one of my favorite words: “juxtaposition.” To my way of thinking it’s a great word, it kind of rolls off the tongue: place or deal with close together for contrasting effect.  Juxtaposition is kind of sexy. Another word high on my list is "bereft." Bereft says it all to me: deprived of or lacking something, esp. a nonmaterial asset : her room was stark and bereft of color. • (of a person) lonely and abandoned, esp. through someone's death or departure.  Not a happy word, but nonetheless descriptive.

There are several words or phrases used almost every day that drive me crazy:

1) enjoy (when used alone, as in "You're going on vacation? Enjoy.")

2) prototype

3) gravitas

4) It is what it is. (Is it good or is it bad?)

5) It’s all good.  (No it isn’t, far from it.)                                      

                     and last but not least:

6) Have a good one.

Blue Monday

Less Is More

Ron Mueck Sculptures

Check out the ENORMOUS sculptures of Ron Mueck.  He started out as a puppeteer among other things - so I can't get enough of this . . . Mueck, Ron  (1958-  ) Ron Mueck is a London-based photo-realist artist. Born in Melbourne, Australia,  to parents who were toy makers, he labored on children’s television shows for 15 years before working in special effects for such films as “Labyrinth,” a 1986 fantasy epic starring David Bowie.     Mueck then started his own company in London, making models to be photographed for advertisements. He has lots of the dolls he made during his advertising years stored in his home. Although some still have, he feels, “a presence on their own,” many were made just to be photographed from a particular angle—”one strip of a face,” for example, with a lot of loose material lurking an inch outside the camera’s frame.   Eventually Mueck concluded that photography pretty much destroys the physical “presence” of the original object, and so he turned to fine art and sculpture. In the early 1990s, still in his advertising days, Mueck was commissioned to make something highly realistic, and was wondering what material would do the trick. Latex was the usual, but he wanted something harder, more precise. Luckily, he saw a little architectural decor on the wall of a boutique and inquired as to the nice, pink stuff’s nature. Fiberglass resin was the answer, and Mueck has made it his bronze and marble ever since.

A House Is Not a Home

Every once in awhile I find items at my local thrift shop that please me no end. Here are two little houses, one is surprisingly heavy:

I fear all is not well under that roof, although it is solid enough to offer lots of protection for the little people inside. And the other is light, it is only a box:  It looks like an English cottage, it could have been in a P.D. James mystery on Masterpiece Theatre.

         

                  

  

Women in Art

Hypnotic . . .