I spent a day working on this painting up in Eagle River. It’s a larger work (20×24) and I’m featuring only the part of the painting that is fairly developed. One of my favorite models, my friendAnna, is modeling for me again.
What could she be finding so pleasant to read, I wonder? Something with words that fall one upon one another like rose petals and rasberries and autumn leaves and drops of dew, all gorgeous, all glowing within themselves, and all heaped up…..Something like a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Here’s an example:
I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn, Fal-
con, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and
striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the
hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, — the achieve of, the mastery of the
thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, of, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a
billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down
sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.
The Windhover
To Christ our Lord
by Gerard Manley Hopkins 1877
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