The Artist Sees, or Maybe Feels and Knows

As day stirs into wakefulness and light,
The artist sees, or maybe feels and knows.
By brick-and-mortar, sky, and cryolite –
The water passing inland as it flows —

The artist sees, or maybe feels and knows?
The process is mysterious and wide —
The water, passing inland as it flows,
Knows how this works, and is not mystified:

The process is mysterious, and wide.
The color in the prism of the mind
Knows how this works and is not mystified,
As freedom flows in circles, unconfined –

The color in the prism of the mind
As day, stirs in to wakefulness, and light:
As freedom flows in circles – unconfined –
By brick-and-mortar, sky, and cryolite



(The photo is of a city called Omis, in Croatia-Dalmatia, and is by a photographer named Landd09. – Owen)

Assumptions (14)

I look at paintings and I think
How full and wondrous it must be
To see or dream, and then to make
That vision a reality.

How I would love, with colored brush,
To bring a world inside my mind
To canvas for the world too see,
And leave this drab gray one behind —

But then recall, with some chagrin,
My father was an artist who
Put brush and paint away for good
When he was only thirty-two.

For though he loved to paint, he was
In a too-common situation:
What he could see, he couldn’t match,
And so stopped out of sheer

Frustration

Tiles

Entering for the first time, we saw a room, big and new, that smelled of newness and spare furniture; its most conspicuous feature was a series of brightly colored tiles covering most of the back wall. These followed no pattern my eyes could make out, but I was fascinated by them: it was as though, even then, my heart knew that art itself resides in the stories we imagine as much or more as any story explicitly told.