The farmer's Market, Copley Square.

Here in this great space, sandwiched between Richardson's Trinity church and McKim's library, In this place of sophisticated aesthetics erupts a celebration of Ceres. A dionynisia of fertility and plenty and beauty, beauty of fruits, beauty of light, beauty of people.

The sky is a pale cobalt cup, a Ming cup, still and translucent and radient.

The lowering rays of sun steal through the branches of the trees and explode in brilliance on the white marquees that shelter under them.

DREAM. 10:45 am

ROW, ROW, ROW......

I'm walking to the garden in Bradock park;

To my little garden plot on this very still

Saturday morning, very still and calm;

And wafting through the air a sound is teasing my ears.

YOUR BOAT.......

I have always wondered that those words

Scan so well. The voice is light and sincere,

Maternal, it seeks my ears so very gently; I sense

A rhythmic movement in the playground at the top of the alley.

GENTLY DOWN THE STREAM...

So gentle she is, gentle as my own mother

Sweet and simple under a porcelain sky.

Down the stream of life I've flown, gently;

Being gentle has never been hard at all for me.

MERRILY, MERRILY, MERRILY, MERRILY....

But oh, my dear mother, the merrily part

That has so often been hard in this my life;

But I have pulled this heavy oar of mine

Happily, no matter how rocky and turbid the stream.

LIFE IS BUT A...........

On the August air the little response failed to carry;

Instead came the rident staccato chime of a child's laugh.

Morning, 8:24 a.m.

Some Comments

This is the headpiece to the poem "Dawn"

Before continuing with the progress of this day in August I will make some comments. These images are all of the area immediately around my apartment, as will be the next few. You've seen these locations before. The man walking through the snow in "Orange Pink Sky" is walking on the same path as can be seen "8:26,"and the bollards with iron rings which appear in "Dawn" are also at in my last post showing snow. The have also, by the way, received the attentions of "The South End Knitters." I am fortunate that when I found myself unable to move around, the place I was confined to was so rich in beauty.

I have told you about my pictorial objectives before I started this series, and now that I have shown you some of them I'll tell how my intentions have changed. The change seems to have stuck because as you will realize the images since, since regaining my mobility, have continued to be informed by it. The image that will follow this post "Morning" was the turning point. I made it on a day when I hadn't any choice but to stay put, but you know the latin proverb, "nulla dies sine linea," even when laid low...

This view out of my window (all right, I'll confess, it is actually from the door) is of the yard which quite literally lies outside my window. There are a few spectacular trees and a lot of junk and clutter. I do, after all, look out onto a functioning, unpaved alley, albeit a very nice one. What to do with the beach chairs, cars and garbage pails? What to do with the telephone poles and low hanging wires? I made them a challenge for myself. The artist, in creating, faces a tricky dichotomy. Are the creation of beauty and the depiction of beauty the same thing? It is the difference between coming upon a beautiful view and making a record of it, on the one hand, or taking a much more prosaic view and arranging it in such a way that a formal beauty is achieved that the passerby might never have noticed on the other. What I had to work with included a lot of junk and wires so I decided to accept them as elements in the composition and see what could result. "Morning, 8:24 am" was the result. it was very stimulating to feel that I had created an image that I felt was beautiful from the mix of elements that I was confronted with. The beauty is not a fiction, I do truly experience it out there, but is created in a very complex process of visual selection and processing that the casual snapshot does not partake of. In fact I felt that I had recorded the beauty of my experience rather than the facts of the objects. I'm very proud of that and having done it, I have continued to work with the wires and signs and even the "pedestrian crassness of the playground with it's ground rubber pavement" which you will see shortly.

I have been asked about the word "rident" which appears in the "Dawn" poem and will appear in some others which follow. It is one of my "Thackeray" words. I had to go to the OED to find the meaning: "radiantly joyful"- what other word could describe a child's laugh or the rising of the sun after a storm. English has a huge lexicon of amazing words of which we use only a small percentage, many are duplicates, of course, but many are beautiful, subtle and very specific.

In the corners of the images you will see some lettering and a box. I design these images to be printed on my printer. The sheet size is 13 inches by 19 inches. they are archival prints and I limit the production to 50. Since I am printing them myself I have the ability to number the sequence of the edition in the file itself each time I print one, and I keep records of when and for whom each was printed. I deal with it in a traditional "printmaking" way. Perhaps one day that will matter to someone! The box receives my signature and the date of the print was made.

7:26 AM

DAWN

...shall I choose the wings of Dawn for my flight...

Cantata "Ich armer Mensch, ich Sünenknect" J.S.bach BWV 55

Dawn! Look, the ardent sun is rising,

Rising over West Newton street and the corridor;

Rising in the East, or at least seems to be so.

But you perhaps remember that it is we,

And with us this delicate, nacreous sky,

Pearl, mother of pearl, mother of us all,

We with our lungs, and with our fragile,

Our mysterious and powerful air,

We are rising as we spin, hurtling

Through the dark and starry void.

We are spinning on our wobbly axis

Like the top of some giant child.

Whirling so fast he couldn't even see us

As we crawl across the South West Corridor Park.

How rident would be that child's laugh-

And perhaps at our expense as we swarm

In our self absorbed festering across this globe;

As we trace our frantic orbit, spinning on our way.

Spinning, and West Newton Street

has just rushed to edge of light

Where the warm and the vibrant;

Where the massively energetic orb

Is glimmering into view to gild this August day.

And that man, do you see him there?

He is spinning at 1000 miles per hour

While being thrown through the track of our orbit

At sixty seven times that speed, and he is walking;

Being late for work he's charging at perhaps

Six miles per hour; my goodness!

What must the addition of his velocity be?

And he is still determinedly upright.

And what is stranger, he doesn't even notice!

Willow along the fenway

This image was made over a year ago, and I am posting it now because I want to illustrate the things I was concerned with prior to last August, just a year ago. I've made reference to my various health problems; I discovered during 2006 that walking was very therapeutic, both physically and mentally, and so became a dedicated walker in the parks, by ways, and neighborhoods of Boston. Boston is a wonderful city for walking and I'd like to tip my hat (you know about my hat) to Antonia Pollak, our parks commissioner. This willow tree is in the fenway, right in front of Simmons College. If you know the area you will realize that the roar of traffic is only slightly to the right of this tree.

The pastoral nature of the image is deliberate. I was immersing myself in the beauty of God's creation. I was consciously trying to mend the despair I've spoken of in earlier posts by praising the beauty I found around me, but I was doing that by pointing out the unadulterated beauty of the natural world without any reference to man's place in it. Fortunately subjects abound in Boston and I have a great many images like this.

Medically,I was also trying to build myself up as much as possible because I knew I was facing a very rigorous year of harsh treatments, which I was warned would leave me bedridden for most of 48 weeks. That started in December of 2007, and for quite some time I continued walking from Holyoke Street to Beth Israel for my weekly treatments- hobbling I should say, but still with my camera, then only one way, and then, by last summer I was on the "T." and no longer walking in Nature.

I have included the detail because I want to illustrate what I have been doing with the images. I hesitate to call them photographs because they do not respond to the technical formalities that really fine photographs should, and because I have never considered myself to be a photographer. I am a painter, and I have managed to learn how to take the raw material my digital camera produces and translate it into images that I would have painted. I hope you can see in the detail some of the levels of manipulation, both of the image and of colors. I actually combined many images to try to give the impression of the movement of the air, and an experience of a moving viewpoint. They are very consciously not a depiction of the place they were taken, but a more generalized and romanticized image.

When I came to the point last summer that I couldn't get around my focus had to change, and my attitude also changed. For me, when I get really, really, sick I become very aware of the fragility of life. I had spent years in despair- I refer to this period in "Lent, part 2," then I had come to treasure this life and immersed myself in it only too find myself to weak to participate. That is where I was last summer.

I am going to show you now what came of it. As with Kingfishers it became a suite of images and words that I think of as a book- so the graphic presentation is also an important part of it for me. I will try to give some sense of the graphic presentation in the following posts. Let me also say, that the treatment ended and I've been recovering from it nicely so don't worry if the tone in the poems seems a bit dark from time to time- all is well and I am in life with both feet- at least I think I am. I sometimes feel that after my last "Near death" experience they didn't quite get all of me back, but that's another story, and a very nice one too!

I call what follows a "Portrait of August." You will get commentary as well as the poems themselves.