Visual Poetry at Portland Library

"Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood"  T.S. Eliot

Enjoying a selection in the Portland Public library

It's usually all about the printed word in the Portland Library.
This Month there is an opportunity for the visual to alliterate.

Three Titans of Portland Art community collaborate for a show entitled Visual Poetry.

All three Galleries possess a stable of solid quality artists.  What some see as a collaborative show I see as a battle royal between the heavy weight contenders of the P-city art community.
In this corner with youthful exuberance and the edge of a razor The June Fitzpatrick Gallery, and in this corner from Boothbay Maine with a touch of class it's the Gleason Gallery.  Last but not least! Defending their Crown as P-City's most prestigious, it's the HHHHUUUUTTTT!,  AKA the GreenHut Gallery.
And the Winner is ?
Of course as always with art it's in the eye of the beholder.

Be that said, none can deny the knock out power of the impressionistic piece of the HUT's Jeff Bye,  his "FDR drive" bespeaks a style that is liberal and thick with brush, the image presented, the dots not all connected. Contrasting that with another Hut artist;  Joel Babb & his piece "Portland's Middle & Exchange."  Babb possesses a style for detail more befit a watchmaker, with a micro brush and the ability to pause time,  Joel's work forces oil into the digital age...visually.  Rhode Island School of design grad John Whalley's graphite on paper work called Photoday is riveting, what a story each face beholds. My awe & another verse exposed  when I realized Whalley's keen skill with the most common of writing implements, a pencil.   Oh there's more,  David Driscoll's woodcut shares with us the poetry of a women's curves and it speaks loudly. Forget not Fitzpatrick's stud; Tom Hall, his mixed media is a Collage of a sky line you'll recognize as a close friend if you've ever strolled Portland's Back Cove or SoPo's Spring Point.

June Fitzpatrick Artist Tom Hall's  Portland Collage

The cool thing about this show for me is that it did forced me into the prose as I looked up a favorite poets most infamous of works.    TS Eliot's Bustopher Jones: The Cat About Town" it's a poem from Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats ,  not known to all but this is the basis for the most successful of visual & audio Broadway shows; Cats!. Here's an excerpt from the poem :


Bustopher Jones is not skin and bones--
In fact, he's remarkably fat.
He doesn't haunt pubs—he has eight or nine clubs,
For he's the St. James's Street Cat!
He's the Cat we all greet as he walks down the street
In his coat of fastidious black:
No commonplace mousers have such well-cut trousers
Or such an impeccable back.
In the whole of St. James's the smartest of names is
The name of this Brummell of Cats;
And we're all of us proud to be nodded or bowed to
By Bustopher Jones in white spats!

Elliots power is his vocabulary and the ease that he has in allowing the reader to create an image.
The Visual Poetry exhibit allows proficient visual artists the opportunity to pontificate on the pallet.  Providing you the chance to view the poetry of the moment presented. 

Poetry the written form can be found on the shelves of the Portland Public Library,
but for VISUAL POETRY drop down into the Library's Lewis Gallery.

Why Go see the Visual Poetry of three of

 Portland's Landmark Art Galleries? 

Go because your good mind needs good art! 

 

 The Gallery Talk is made possible by the generosity of the 
WMPG Radio listening community.  This blog is the text version of the 
art rant heard every Thursday at 7am, 5 & 9:30pm on
WMPG college and community radio broadcasting
   from the University of Southern Maine

90.9 , 104.1 and streaming on the web at http://www.wmpg.org/  

Note: WMPG 90.9 fm has increased it's FM signal strength from 1100 kilowatts to  4500 kilowatts! Thank you for making that possible. This means that you are now able to hear MPG on your car radio from Brunswick Maine to Dover, New Hampshire.  The station management, the University of Southern Maine & DJ's are totally pumped and excited about the ability to bring you fresh diverse live radio with a clean crisp sound!