Thanks, Sarah-Jane, for taking on the Art board.
Normally, with your Ekphrastic101 ekphrastic poem you start with an obect or a scene, and write a poem about or around it. I'm doing this the other way around, and having trouble. The poem is below. It's an oldie from my first book that I always liked, and always thought of as "ekphrastic", although there was no specific painting or object I had in mind - but I always thought it was calling for one. But I'm a writer, not a painter. The poem is below, and below that are links to a few paintings I found in my wanderings (through the internet, not through Europe). Each relate to the poem in some way, but none perfectly. Whaddya think?
The Man Who Painted Women
We watched you as you limned a woman’s face
and body – got it right – the half-held breath,
the promise seen implicit in the eyes,
the tension of the shadows on her flesh,
and yet you seemed unpleased. You gave her pearls,
then scarves, to try to capture and reflect
an essence – stepped back further, further,
inserting dark green dabs to form a bed,
and built on that until you’d filled the space
with tables, bureaus, bottles, fresh cut flowers
lying in the fragments of a shattered vase –
a note, a spill of wine, a twisted mirror –
added windows and a door – and finally you
stepped out of one of them to freeze the view.
https://www.metmuseum.org/-/media/im...w=173&m h=119
https://www.metmuseum.org/-/media/im...w=173&m h=119
https://www.studiointernational.com/...w-2011/2-b.jpg
https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upl...-s1600-c85.jpg
https://www.metmuseum.org/-/media/im...w=173&m h=119