painting update + Figge article in Reader

first off, there's an article about/featuring the new Figge Art Museum director in the new River Cities Reader here, with some commentary about what the nature of the collection/exhibition plan should be. i didn't quite see some posters' points of view, so i chimed in a couple times.

i finished up work on the revamped version of "Sandburg: Baltic Fog Notes." i like the work better, but i'm still not convinced it's a great piece. ah well though. it's kind of rough and shoddy; the grass blades feel clumsy and overall it's not very cleanly crafted. it's not really how i originally saw this, but maybe i should embrace that with this one. we'll see how my feelings go.

here's the new image. as always, click on the pic for a larger view. if you are interested in seeing the original version, skip down a few posts.


















matt pulford
sandburg: baltic fog notes
latex paint, enamel paint, and polycrlic on routed canvas
2008



Carl Sandburg
Baltic Fog Notes
from Smoke and Steel, 1922

(Bergen) SEVEN days all fog, all mist, and the turbines pounding through high seas.
I was a plaything, a rat’s neck in the teeth of a scuffling mastiff.
Fog and fog and no stars, sun, moon.
Then an afternoon in fjords, low-lying lands scrawled in granite languages on a gray sky,
A night harbor, blue dusk mountain shoulders against a night sky,
And a circle of lights blinking: Ninety thousand people here.
Among the Wednesday night thousands in goloshes and coats slickered for rain,
I learned how hungry I was for streets and people.

I would rather be water than anything else.
I saw a drive of salt fog and mist in the North Atlantic and an iceberg dusky as a cloud in the gray of morning.
And I saw the dream pools of fjords in Norway … and the scarf of dancing water on the rocks and over the edges of
mountain shelves.
Bury me in a mountain graveyard in Norway.
Three tongues of water sing around it with snow from the mountains.

Bury me in the North Atlantic.
A fog there from Iceland will be a murmur in gray over me and a long deep wind sob always.

Bury me in an Illinois cornfield.
The blizzards loosen their pipe organ voluntaries in winter stubble and the spring rains and the fall rains bring letters
from the sea.



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