Posts tagged "artist" — Page 4

Untitled I

To all viewers but yourself, what matters is the product – the finished artwork. To you, and you alone, what matters is the process: the experience of shaping the work.1

A struggle with my daily drabble. Three discordant points occupy my mind, defying order; a disparate triangle.

Kendrick Castillo. Student (their child!) dies defending his Colorado classmates during (another!) school shooting. We the People christen him a hero.

Kurt Cobain, beautiful, (self-deceased) idealist. All apologies.

Brown Bird in my garden, perched atop a sunburned finial. Teacup size, befitting call of teakettle, teakettle, teakettle. Translation: In the sun I feel as one.2

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Musee des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

~W. H. Auden

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