Simple home recipes for my daughter. Original poetry.
Figs are one of my favourite fruit. When I was in Greece, I was thunderstuck by the amount of figs fallen to the footpaths from overhanging trees. Fallen figs were underfoot. All that gorgeous bounty, gone to waste. I was…
If you follow the source link in the caption below the image, you’ll discover that this painting was used as a screen in a fireplace. The idea was to make it look like there was another room beyond the hearth….
I was inspired to write this poem by the intensity of van Gogh’s colours, and in particular the brushwork of the tablecloth. It seemed to me as if the fruit are falling into hyperspace, or are themselves experimenting with gravity…
The artist here, Ben Benn was a pioneering modernist. Born in 1884 in what is now known as Ukraine, he migrated to America with his family and settled in New York, where he first exhibited in the early 1900s with…
I was particularly struck, not just by the concentration in this young woman’s face and demeanour, but by the notes on The Met website (see link in Source in the caption below). The painter Nicolaes Maes deliberately veered away from…
This poem is an apostrophe, and by that I don’t mean a punctuation mark! Excuse me if you already know this!😃 In grammar, apostrophes either indicate possession, or they stand in for missing letters . As literary devices, apostrophes also…
In The Merchant’s Wife poem, I continue my poeticised response to “food-related” art, specifically in this painting as to what they may be having for breakfast or morning tea. If you’d like a close-up of the painting, click on “source”…
This painting is so full of life, and yet we will never know who painted it! Even so, I thought that person should be celebrated. More of my ekphrastic poetry here. More on the ode, here. Ode To An Unknown…
This poem in my ekphrastic series is inspired not by one art source, but by two. Both works of art — a painting, and a short story — were completed within a decade of each other. More on the short…
How could you look at this stunning Renoir and not want to reach out and eat those fruit? This work was painted at the country house of Renoir’s patron, Paul Berard, and is one of two that feature the same…
Can you imagine the conversation at this dinner table? Well, I tried to. Another in my ekphrastic poetry series. My of my ekphrastic poetry here. More on free verse here. The Enlightenment At the Thursday night dinner of philosophers,it was…
I don’t know what it was about this boy’s face that caught my eye. Or maybe it was the apple on the floor? The half-eaten cake? That gesture which seems to declare, “Mine!”. I just tried to have fun with…
