Greatest Hits Gallery--Bekah T.

A talented artist in her own right, Bekah T. kept the class honest by asking us which was more important in our ekphrastic adventures--the poem or the work to which it responded? Of course the answer to that is complicated, as she demonstrates in her own poems, a series on the various kinds of modern art with which she experimented in her own recent art, especially as they connect to painters and their audiences. Here are two, one on cubism and a second on Pure Abstraction.

Cubist Landscape

I took the mountains into myself,
felt their thick sides pushing out from within,
tasted the dusty purple they turn at dusk,
and tried to find a way to share that with you.

I wan to sculpt a painting
you can’t walk by
without touching.
Trace the rim of a hardened blue brushstroke.
Feel the frozen moment, the frozen movement.
As I pile on more and more paint
I’m building mountain ranges and scraping
away valleys. The canvas is the landscape
Or is trying its best to be.

It is important
to understand the feeling of mountains within you,
to take the landscape and embody it
not just symbolize the volcano by its triangular point
but to feel it erupt within you.

These tectonic movements shatter
a paintbrush.
Its no tool for making mountains,
No more than am I.

Pure Abstraction

It’s the 50’s and time to reduce the world.
In a silent, non-explosive sort of way
the subjects are being blown right out of paintings.
Where there used to be city skylines, office buildings, skyscrapers,
where there used to be people working, driving, and dying
Mondrian’s lozenges now lead the way.
Their silent in a non-human, non-messy sort of way.
The colors stay within their boundaries.
Thick black horizontals and verticals
give us a systematic understanding
of how very nice structure is.

All that is unnecessary is morally wrong.
It’s the universal essence we’re worried about.
Quiet down please
I don’t speak your language.
I’m afraid your perspective just
makes this more complicated.
We want the universal, the silence
where all differences are erased, not so
that we can come together. Unity
Is not what we’re going for.

Yes, it takes rather a lot of violence
to reach silence
but how nice it is
how pure.
Pay no attention to the rubble
(or the people under it)
It’ll be cleared away in due time.

Bekah Explores D. Hooker's Brain

David Hooker’s Studio—Bekah T.

1

Failed paintings
and his own strict sense of honor.
Art is reams of images:
Dogs,
Scuba divers,
Guernica,
Slave ship diagram,
Bird cage,
Cartoons.
Jesus
And Britney Spears
On a pillow.
Is it right or is it easy?
When the images click
Do they tell a story, ask a question,
Present an answer in three dimensional space?
Resisting the pull of the semester
He lets things sit, rest in his mind
Images colliding with images
On paper, on canvas
Till they begin to take
Concrete clay shape
And even then
The deer is in danger of decapitation
The cat of becoming a Klan member
The Statue of Liberty of losing its head.

2--Waiting the Idea Out

If I sit
Long enough,
If I work
On three casts of dogs
That all break at firing
If I wait
The idea out
Maybe It’ll change.
I wont have to decapitate
The lawn ornament deer,
paint a stormy sky,
Or confuse Guernica with a cartoon.

Making art is having
The courage
To do the ungodly,
Profane the sacred.
Mix cults and crosses,
Dogs and freedom,
A praying mantis
And the cartoon south.

Sometimes the piece is too demanding
And calls me to a direction I am not quite
Ready for.
I am not that brave or that strong.
Check back in three years
After college, a mortgage,
Two kids and a career.
When I get my first gray hairs
And gain the age required for
Following sacrilege.
Maybe I’ll be ready then
Maybe.
Maybe.


3

It’s too hot to work in a room of 2,000 degree creativity, and a firing squad
Pacing outside. Dogs fly through canvases and eat the statue of Liberty. It’s
Getting too hot as Brittney Spears covers Jesus, and Guernica holds a cartoon gun.
My hands are bleeding
What happens
The fire is too hot, the space too cold. There are miles and miles in between antlers
And doves. Whole cities exist between headless statues and dead
Pet
Dogs. What happens
The mind turns and tomorrow and three years from now

Sit for hours and absorb one image, realize the color, the cut
It’s wrong. It’s easy not right
Easy, too easy
Smash 2,000 lbs of clay into cookie cutter lawn ornament molds
Something will turn out
Something
Thing
Some point of combined interest,
Asking a question
I don’t know what it means.