A PAINTING IS A PAINTING

A painting is a painting

It’s not like you or me

Nobody gets older  

No one ever sleeps. 

It’s a stillness made of life

With meaning in its air

You feel it as you watch it,

Even as you stare:

At those forever praying

Or lying nude aware

Not of us but God

And the artist never there.

We travel time to then

And then to us appears;

Time becomes transparent

And what is far comes near. 

Who gave their life to painting

That we can know life more?

The artist in his garret?

The model in her maze?

We think of things self-evident

When we observe those lives

Frozen in the minerals

Of pigments and the mind

But what of art’s intention?

Does it think or know the way?

The artist isn’t talking;

There’s nothing more to say. 

Who made a painting matter

Then vanished long ago?

Who gave their life to painting

So we enjoy life more?

John Sevcik

How Is the Eye to See?

How is the eye to see, or hand to move,
Charcoal burning into what is mind
As cave painters long ago brushed
The ends of their lit torches into line?
How does the hand walk into the eye,
Talk to the ear, dance for the heart?
What is the timing of pure art?

In academies, since the Renaissance,
Refining measures were the near objective,
Discovery of nature further on.
Later in Rococo time, how was the prim
To be addressed, or the melancholy,
Or how to draw the person who has flown
By psyche to another place and time?

Or after Realism and Courbet,
Renoir, Eakins and Monet?
First the masses: how to weigh
Their slim recumbency, or say
How is the model older this week –
Can you tell? – or younger to an Age
You will not know? And how to draw
The blithe completeness of her form
In times both analytic and assured?

Along with central heating, and
Fluorescent lights
Skin is not pallor, only temperature.
So much about us medicine
And ill, we have to draw beyond,
Or long ago. Empirically we know,
Subjectively we draw – though how we think
Is too much only us.

To feel the other standing in a space,
Waiting to be seen and understood,
Remains a vestibule of intimates;
How the vulnerable model charms
By her quiet surprise of grace –
These are some infinities of space.

John Sevcik