My friend, painter Derek Sean Quinlan is opening a showing of new works at Artguise, called Up the Street / Down the Road.
Since I’m supposed to be working, I’ll just steal their blurb, shall I?
“In this series Derek continues to develop his painterly style using subtle atmospheric realism. These new works have a soft warm quality with an apt sense of depth and detail. His subject matter is an attractive pairing of rural and urban settings rendered with delicate blended brush strokes. Derek’s rich pastoral sunsets are juxtaposed with elegant city avenues and alleyways. The works give the viewer pause to squint from a distance to ascertain whether they are viewing a snapshot of reality or a lush realist impression fashioned in paint. Derek’s ability to fool the eye of his audience has become one of the trademarks of his work featured in our exhibition space.”
October 15th, 2007
Posted by Dave Edwards Comments
This is one of my favourite poems. I’ve posted this before on the old version of the blog, but since that no longer exists, and since it is autumn, and since I haven’t posted anything since November, here it is again.
Spring and Fall, to a Young Child
Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
November 11th, 2006
Posted by Dave Edwards Comments
Dulce et Decorum Est
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! — An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori1.
Last night, I attended the vernissage of my friend — and sometime guitarist — Derek Quinlan’s latest show of new paintings, called Still Living, at Artguise Gallery.
It was a busy show on a warm night. A lot of people came, and the room got so close that there were always some guests out cooling off with their drinks on the sidewalk of Bank Street.
Derek works from snapshots, producing paintings that are at least superficially . . . the quality of a fleeting memory. representative and realistic, yet distant and abstracted. The images have the quality of a fleeting memory. These paintings are very good, the best work I’ve seen of his, and they are being well received.
Drop by Artguise if you want to see them — it’s at 590 Bank Street in The Glebe. Derek will be there some evenings too, so tell him I sent you.
Lesson: when backing-up your computer for a full reintstall of the operating system, remember also to include your MySQL databases — including the one that contains all your blog material.
Needless to say, that is what I didn’t do. So, the old blog is no more. There are remnants of it out there in the caches of search engines, but I don’t think anything worth reconstituting ever appeared on the old blog anyway.
I’m not upset, because the old blog was pretty sparse. I hadn’t put a lot into it. I must try to make this one more worth saving.
I’ve changed the path to the blog to “/blog”, but for those of you subscribed to my RSS feed, I’ve kept the older “/blahg” around for the time being. It’ll go sooner or later.
