Product and legacy

 Product and legacy 

I listen to Stella who knows about art and artists

their lives and work 

what others thought of them ( too often Ruskin) 

and I try to piece together, this one before that one? 

Whistler influenced and influencing ( unpleasant modern verb) 

how to go from pre to post

realism / neo, 

from Ah a chair, a jug, clearly an interior 

Dutch perhaps? 

To colours spattered, carefully it seems

Pollock not random 

and certainly not Rothko, those colours most deliberate 

and on the canvas making each other sing 

zing  out loud,

via Turner, moving to abstraction 

Academy decisions unheeded 

and Monet by the water blurring as he aged

or Picasso dissecting his women 

 and the dead of Guernica 

Klimt and Klee, gold alluring like kintsugi 

Japanese poured in cracks

or Midas in the myth. 

I think of Haiku, sonnet, quatrains, ballad form 

heroic couplets rhyming and words 

tossed in the air like Pollock’s paint 

spattered random, rearranged, free fall

and ponder history and timeline 

art in all its forms adored/ abhorred 

poured from the pen the brush 

or pebbles spiralled on the sand 

Gormley’s men  submerging by the sea 

product and legacy, sand blasted into glass 

or castles just between the tides 

art in all its forms or shapeless 

head hand soul 

product and legacy? 

November 11th 2021 Hounoux