Artists that move me : 

                                                     Paul Cezanne:              

                                     

     Last Fall I spent hours looking deeply, and with a ravenous visual appetite, at the middle and late period still lives of Cezanne. They are sculpted, monumental, and yet somehow also tender and delicate.  How could a painter put all of these feelings into one canvas....and then do that very same thing again and again. He was a prickly painter-poet- monk of the highest order.

                    

I have grown very weary of hearing about Picasso and his “genius.”  Braque and Picasso merely stylized Cezanne’s reconstruction, and reinvention, of pictorial space.  Cezanne found this new space  in a natural, mysterious, painterly, and searching manner. The Cubists trivialized this new space by turning this restructuring into a formula: depicting things from multiple perspectives.  Cezanne’s paintings are much more about time unfolding slowly, as it does when you gradually turn your head to see the various views of one room, of the objects on a table, of a pine forest full of streaming light.

                                                                                     

                                                         Vermeer:

                   

    It is very hard for me to even express how I feel about his work.  It is so still and full of mystery.  It  just makes me feel happy to be alive.  These are my two favorites. Sometimes, I think that A Girl Holding a Pitcher is the most beautiful, most perfect, painting ever created. It is hope made tangible.

                           

                           

                                                    Vilhelm Hammershoi:

    Can you believe this painting? I was not aware of his work until recently. It was like discovering a secret, babbling, warm underground spring  that  no one was supposed to find, that no one was still enough to actually take in and feel. Just take a moment. (Danish early 20th century)

                                            

Poems as Painting Inspiration

Bus Stop

Lights are burning
In quiet rooms
Where lives go on
Resembling ours.

The quiet lives
That follow us—
These lives we lead
But do not own—

Stand in the rain
So quietly
When we are gone,
So quietly . . .
And the last bus
Comes letting dark
Umbrellas out—
Black flowers, black flowers.

And lives go on.
And lives go on
Like sudden lights
At street corners

Or like the lights
In quiet rooms
Left on for hours,
Burning, burning.

                    Donald Justice

Come In

As I came to the edge of the woods,
Thrush music -- hark!
Now if it was dusk outside,
Inside it was dark.

Too dark in the woods for a bird
By sleight of wing
To better its perch for the night,
Though it still could sing.

The last of the light of the sun
That had died in the west
Still lived for one song more
In a thrush's breast.

Far in the pillared dark
Thrush music went --
Almost like a call to come in
To the dark and lament.

But no, I was out for stars;
I would not come in.
I meant not even if asked;
And I hadn't been.

                   Robert Frost

Men at Forty

Men at forty

Learn to close softly

The doors to rooms they will not be

Coming back to.

At rest on a stair landing,

They feel it

Moving beneath them now like the deck of a ship,

Though the swell is gentle.

And deep in mirrors

They rediscover

The face of the boy as he practices tying

His father's tie there in secret

And the face of that father,

Still warm with the mystery of lather.

They are more fathers than sons themselves now.

Something is filling them, something

That is like the twilight sound

Of the crickets, immense,

Filling the woods at the foot of the slope

Behind their mortgaged houses.

                             Donald Justice