PAGE 25
What drives men
I’ve just come away from my Kirkby Village Art Group booking with a fistful of notes, so I can replace my champagne. The fridge is empty without it.
Completely.
I finished off my previous bottle yesterday at Paolo and Nathan’s. The celebration? My poem ‘Artist drawing a pregnant woman’ is Bridport shortlisted. Over eight thousand poems entered, less than two hundred on the shortlist. I do the maths (laboriously). I belong to the two-and-a-half per cent. Yey. I already knew that’s where I belonged. The world needs to catch up with my knowledge.
The second stanza came out of Conservative Jeremy’s mouth. God. What drives men.
Artist drawing a pregnant woman
Each sitting he sees a change in her stomachand re-draws it, makes it exact, a perfect
object, the symmetry of its globe absolute,
its curve pure mathematics. He has charted
her collar-bones, delineated their shady pockets,
measured her chin and her nose’s angle,
captured her forehead precisely. Sometimes when stooping to pick up charcoal
or boiling the kettle, death comes out of nowhere,
grips him while he’s holding a coffee cup
or right in the middle of cleaning brushes.
Death like a vice, arms pinned to sides,
muscles paralysed, breathing stopped, life
switched off, no spark left, his flat pitch-black. How to control her, the way she spills over
on the chair’s hard surface, that fractional swing
as she hangs like a pear on his paper,
filled-out skin shadowless, nipples gone soft,
each sitting worse: tonight she is nebulous,
bone-structure lost, all her hollows lost,
her belly rippling, dimpling. in KUNST poetry collection (Indigo Dreams 2012)
This week’s topic
25. What makes artists top themselves?
Note to speakers of English as a second language: top onesself = kill onesself
Click on the above link to add further to this discussion. Please comment too about my serial, or put up a poem – by you or anyone else – on the discussion thread ensuing from the above topic. I’d love that!
By the way, if you want to put up art/ a picture but don’t know how, email it to admin@sukithelifemodel.co.uk with your comment. He’ll do it for you.
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Noticeboard
1. I love looking at artists’ blogs.
It’s the personalities, not just the art-work. Two UK artists to whose blogs I currently subscribe are: Yorkshire-based David Thomas and Lancashire-based Joe Hesketh. One of these is female (- which?). One is so erudite my brain hurts. The other is so colourful my eyes hurt.
You an artist? Got a blog? Email admin@sukithelifemodel.co.uk and I’ll list you next week on this very noticeboard! No matter if it’s not in English!
2. My poetry collection KUNST, illustrated (in monochrome) with sketches of me by fifteen artists and including the above poem (to hear it, click here and scroll down to ‘Poems’), costs £4.99 post-free. There’s a subscribers’ discount too! Buy it here. Read the reviews here.
3. Not a subscriber yet?
I would be delighted if you were. It just means you get notified by email each Thursday when my weekly episodes go online. And I gain hugely from knowing a particular number of people are likely to check in and have a read at some point in the week.
Subscribe at the foot of this post – it’s free! Thank you.
4. On its first anniversary, please take this opportunity to view, again, UNDER THE GAZE, the 28-minute audio-visual piece about the tragic life of a certain life-model, created from Bel‘s photographs and my writings.
[Return to homepage]
1. I love looking at artists’ blogs.
It’s the personalities, not just the art-work. Two UK artists to whose blogs I currently subscribe are: Yorkshire-based David Thomas and Lancashire-based Joe Hesketh. One of these is female (- which?). One is so erudite my brain hurts. The other is so colourful my eyes hurt.
You an artist? Got a blog? Email admin@sukithelifemodel.co.uk and I’ll list you next week on this very noticeboard! No matter if it’s not in English!
2. My poetry collection KUNST, illustrated (in monochrome) with sketches of me by fifteen artists and including the above poem (to hear it, click here and scroll down to ‘Poems’), costs £4.99 post-free. There’s a subscribers’ discount too! Buy it here. Read the reviews here.
3. Not a subscriber yet?
I would be delighted if you were. It just means you get notified by email each Thursday when my weekly episodes go online. And I gain hugely from knowing a particular number of people are likely to check in and have a read at some point in the week.
Subscribe at the foot of this post – it’s free! Thank you.
4. On its first anniversary, please take this opportunity to view, again, UNDER THE GAZE, the 28-minute audio-visual piece about the tragic life of a certain life-model, created from Bel‘s photographs and my writings.
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Artist of the week
DAVID MARKHAM, aged 50, is currently producing a series of sketches at a rate of one per week for each year of his life. See them on his blog. David specialises in sketching buildings but also attends life-drawing groups including the one at Redbrick Mill (scroll down to Batley, UK for details) where he produced the above fab pen-and-ink drawing.
[Return to homepage]
DAVID MARKHAM, aged 50, is currently producing a series of sketches at a rate of one per week for each year of his life. See them on his blog. David specialises in sketching buildings but also attends life-drawing groups including the one at Redbrick Mill (scroll down to Batley, UK for details) where he produced the above fab pen-and-ink drawing.
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Please subscribe to my serial (it’s free)
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