Stars of 2014 #2

Hello everybody, I hope you're doing well and bursting with creative ideas now please let me introduce you to...

 

Coming from London, UK, Alec Bell has been writing for a little over 50 years. "I suppose it's all been about personal development. The immediate prompt was a TV show which part of the Open University's Literature programme (though I was never a student). A lecturer was discussing the poetry of Wifred Owen,whom I'd never heard of. I realised if he could turn the experience of the Western front into art, then I could use poetry to (eventually) make sense of my experience. That continues to be my programme, even now. I most enjoy sharing my work by performance, which is a regular, though modest part of my life." 
  

Framed And HungThey seem sanitised, as if edited for an alien eye. Noise, colour, motion, the gamut of possibility all removed. The artist has sought moments of accidental intimacy, such as occasionally flare  between  the myriad strangers  on the city’s vibrant streets.
Here a woman, hoping she instantiates glamour, unguardedly allows her loneliness to peer through her mask of aloof solitude. This child peers without guile at the black hole of the camera lens. Maybe his soul remains unstolen, but his open gaze (enlarged to occupy such space as he could not imagine) confronts a face that he will never see. The visitor to the gallery  feels obscurely the life pooled in sightless eyes.
Are images real?
Rapidly the shutter snaps,
What does it capture?  InconsequentialSuch an irony, to be so close to you,
so accidentally intimate. So sad those costumes
we had borrowed, disguises for those who
otherwise might have recognised our shades.
If only the moment had supported
the depths of our hidden agenda, if only
our potentiality had exploded around us.
As I departed you proffered your hand,
I felt your transcendent smile. You
turned your back, for your next assignment
was closing in on you. I walked away
as the door was closing behind me.   WingsOnly in imagination could such wings be spread,
in fancy alone could concerted muscle wrench
the burden of equine flesh free of gravity,
leaving those grasping and jealous arms empty.
What sort of creature could this fabled beast, this Pegasus, be?
The ancients first dreamed the mythic horse among the foaming
breakers of the agitated sea. The fabulous creature, so they believed,
was sired by Poseidon, the ocean’s ancient, imperious king.
They also told how Pegasus was born at Medusa’s death.
The gorgon had been impregnated by Poseidon. As Perseus
struck off the monster’s head, the flying horse drew in his first breath.
and spread those fantastic, those impossible wings.
Consider how the ocean’s stallion might take flight supported
by great pinions  matured in the plumbless deeps of inspiration.
Picture how such a creature might climb to visionary peaks,
transporting quotidian routine beyond its mundane horizons.
Bacon's 'Three Figures'Those filthy little bastards
wouldn’t let me go. I moulded
them with layer on layer
of thick, sticky paint.
At the start of each day I was near
to vomiting. By lunchtime
pining for a drink. After I set
the brushes aside my lover
opened the wine. He and I
with our Bacchanalia to
deaden the end of each day.
In misery, self-loathing and disgust
I completed my obsessive task.
I at last became a painter,
though I lost enthusiasm
when I decided the Three Figures
were completed. There was nothing
in me left for the cross.
Three Figures, then, without a Crucifixion.
A trio of faceless hominids
               without a prayer.   SubversionOh! How the dark hand
of physicality reaches deep within me,
how firmly it grips the triggers
of need and yearning. My spirit's dark night
is haunted by spectres brewed
from the toxins of desire.
Sir Thomas wore a hair shirt,
I have surrendered to the imperious fire.   Storyville, Bordello Sketches1
Girls, pale skinned and nubile,
who by candle light might pass,
women who lend a joint a little class,
a suggestion of sass in the swing of the ass,
these were the gems the madams looked out for,
girls who could turn sad guys into would-be Casanovas.
Still the punters knew that the dollar was always king,
their dollars could buy them any pretty thing
in the room. They also knew that black girls
had learned what they had to do for a necklace of pearls
and stockings of silk. So the guys played make believe.
In the first light of dawn nobody was deceived.
2
The Storyville madams
hired piano players, even bands
to help the girls along. The punters liked
to feel how the girls swayed against them
as music's rhythms took them
voyaging around the floor.
Close like that,
the girl can soften up her chosen guy,
make sure that one of them at least
can get her money's worth.
She'll let the fumes of spirit tame him,
if she's good at reading the score.
Then what happens? There's a war.
The Crescent
Paul Klee's War EffortUnexpectedly, he is working
in an aircraft hangar. The destructions
of the war have been raging now
for more than thirty months. Still
he wields his brush. He paints abstract
shapes that might lend invisibility
to the German Empire’s flying war machines.
Such is the artist’s function in this
                               season of slaughter
While he paints he dreams
of the vivid North African sun.
He visited in the year that
the war erupted. He returned,
declaring that he had at last
discovered colour. He was ready
to paint. “Colour and I are one.”
he declared on his return.
He may already be exploring
that miniature world of magical
forms that he created on paper
and canvas throughout his
twenty working years. He painted,
he said, those invisible realities
that always surround us,
latent, awaiting revelation in   Felines, For Athina.Their bodies express a svelte determination.
It seems at times as though they share a single mind,
seeming as one to swarm, slither and slide down staircases.
Their sleek, dark coats surprise the unwary, disconcerted
by those amber lanterns. those shiny and unblinking eyes.
Erect ears, lashing tails, limber bodies, velvet pelted,
They might easily be demons in disguise. Familiars indeed,
who knows where their familiarity might lead?
Their passion driven cacophonies create barbaric music,
evince a total abandon, absolute debauchery.   Fallen Angel1.
A late night wanderer discovered what was left of him,
his crumpled form impacted on the winter sidewalk,
below an open window on the second floor
- the end at last of an angel's interminable fall,
Someone from the hotel covered his cooling remains
with a well worn blanket. Too late to change anything,
too much living heat already dissipating through the night.
In the room with the open window, his trumpet lay discarded,
among a litter of clothes, some coke and heroin. The curtains
stirred on the knife edge of the frosty wind.
2.
In my alienated adolescence, I had loved him from afar,
He filled my damaged heart with that Delphic song his trumpet sang,
In my nocturnal solitude, as the miraculous discs revolved,
it seemed as though Apollo spoke again in North American groves,
through golden Californian days. Already his shining life was cursed.
He had begun his search for chemistry to dull whatever ills
his ethereal music belied. Too often his trumpet was hostage
among the pawn b     



 

Elwira Pawlikowska or Evi comes from Poland and on deviantArt she's known under the nickname GrimDream. As to her beginnings she says "...I guess just as every other artist I started to draw in a nursery school. But I began to develop my skills seriously when I was preparing myself for entrance exams for Faculty of Architecture (about 10 years ago)." Her major goal is to be able to paint everything she can imagine in the best possible way. "At present I earn a living with art and I'd like to feel stable with that." And what inspires her? "I always admired "Old Masters" - Leonardo da Vinci, Albrecht Durer, Giovanni Battista Piranesi.  Moreover listening to the music and long walks in woods - so the best combination is walking in woods with my MP3 player " 

 

Tallon-1 comes from Graz, Austria. "I started with photography 3 years ago; I just wanted to take some photos that people could use like a desktop background " He finds creative impulses all around him "...I get inspired by literally everything and everyone. " And what's his goal? "It's simple - I want to make people happy, to cheer them up with my photos."