Mimi Farina

This is a painting of the beautiful Mimi Farina the sister of the equally beautiful Joan Baez. I came across a black and white photo of Mimi and was struck by her natural beauty and decided to paint her in colour. The eye colour and flesh tones and even the hair colour to a lesser degree are pure guesswork on my part, so my apologies if I have guessed wrong. Mimi sadly died far too young.

The Tin God.

I came across this sculpture outside Saatchi’s gallery in London and was amazed by the strength of it. I thought for a long time on how to paint it and eventually ended up with this composition. The Tin God holding the world in it’s hand.

Ring your bells.

 

Ring your bells to this way toll

To resonate in glory

Then sit you down and listen hard

I’ll tell to you a story

On glistening hills, on rolling moor

In the autumn of the year

Full howling gale and hard black rain

Whose noise it filled the air

The stranger rode his snorting beast

His eyes were coal black holes

Through the drowning rain he came

To seek the fingered souls

The sickly child, the tortured wife

He found them all with ease

Then ripped their souls with bloody lust

And cast them to the breeze

The innocent, the guilty too

They fell to fill his load

With cackle laugh and streaming cloak

He thundered down the road

Rich or poor, the lost and found

If named and on his list

Their epitaph was writ in blood

They died beneath his kiss

So harken now and heed this tale

When next the storm doest break

For death will ride the highways

With his list of souls to take

Life is there to live in full

Each day a precious gift

For the only man who fears not death

Is the man who never lived.

 

The Hooded Lady

Peter Pan

I remember walking in Hyde Park in London and coming across a statue of Peter Pan and thinking about it later this poem drifted into my mind.

Peter Pan lives in the park now

He stands on a mountain of stone

His gaze is fixed past the serpentine

To a place faraway that was home

Pan lives in the park now

In bronze he is tethered and cold

There is something of death about him

But yet he will never grow old

Pan lives in the park now

The casting hides his yearning to fly

But I swear if you look at him closely

You can see a bronze tear in his eye

Pan lives in the park now

No music, no children to play

Eternity stretches before him

As day rolls to night rolls to day

Pan lives in the park now

Neverland will be never again

Because Pan he dies in the park now

And if you see him you will feel his pain.

 

Amongst broken branches.

This poem came to me whilst I walked through a forest and suddenly came across a huge section that had been cut down, leaving only an odd bare trunk that seemed to stand guard over it’s fallen friends. A sad and desolate place, waiting for new life to be breathed into the ravaged earth, but a place to reflect, in the way that sitting in a cemetery seems to bring about reflection and questioning.

 Like twisted limbs the trees did bend

Their trunks in tortured stance

The wind did whip and howl and tear

To force them into dance

The forest deep in dappled greens

Did swallow in my sounds

In silent step on cushioned earth

I walked this hallowed ground

The whispers came like murmured prayers

Soft floating through the air

They cut the wind like spirit knives

But no single leaf did stir

‘What love, what love,’ the whisper asked

‘What love, what truth is this?’

‘In unrequited warm embrace

Doest linger in her kiss?’

The question asked the murmur fades

From when and whence it lives

Whilst words they burrow deep and worm

No answers do they give

And so it goes this forest stroll

Amongst these stricken trees

The truth it lies ‘mongst broken branch

By lips brought to it’s knees

Looking out from the roof of the world.

This is painted on a broken slate roof tile. I loved the texture of the old slate and wondered if it would accept acrylic paint. It does but with difficulty. I think it makes for an interesting object.