blogs
How I came to marry poems and paintings
During lockdown, I began to explore my husband’s collection of the art books which filled his shelves and which I had never previously paid much attention to. I came to realise that there might be a p ........
How paintings have inspired my poems
At the heart of the poetry project was a feeling of wonder - wonder at the skill of the artist, and also wonder at what the artist meant to convey, always aware that my intuition might be very d ........
The driving force of poetry
I have learned a great deal through writing these poems. As a child, art and literature were linked: my mother had a book of Pre-Raphaelite paintings where I found, to my delight, The Lady of Shalott, ........
How to match the poetic form to the painting
One of the intriguing challenges was to find a poetic form that would complement the painting. For example, Turner’s Snowstorm at Sea needed, I thought, a rising and falling structure to match the shi ........
Children in paintings and poems
Children often seem to be a focal point of the paintings that I chose. I have already mentioned the joyful girl in Balla’s Young Girl Running on a Balcony and the frightened, mute boy in Chardi ........
Animals in paintings and poems
So many painters, I found, wonderfully capture in paint the grace, ferocity or fidelity of animals. I was greatly taken with the faithful lion in Antonello Da Messina’s Saint Jerome in his Study ........
Landscapes in paintings and poems
Rich, lovely or desolate, fields harvested by men, gardens that recall Eden, untouched wilderness - so many landscapes in the paintings seem as vivid as any we encounter with our five senses! ........
States of mind in paintings and poems
The tensions, doubts, hopes, despair or joy that we feel are powerfully explored in many paintings. Even as I seek to find the words to express these, I realise that I am intruding on wordless m ........
Love in paintings and poems
Children often seem to be a focal point of the paintings that I chose. I have already mentioned the joyful girl in Balla’s Young Girl Running on a Balcony and the frightened, mute boy in Chardin ........
Death in paintings and poems
And so to the last of my examples for this blog about my poems from paintings, where the warm, vibrant hand of the artist confronts death. In Frans Hals’ Portrait of a Young Man with a Skull ........