Sketchbook_6-1_JanFeb_2011_Ekphrastic_Poem_The_Flood_Bernard_Gieske_and_Oliver

Sketchbook

a journal for eastern and western forms

Ekphrastic Poetry

Bernard Gieske, US Poet and Oliver Vernon, US Painter

Painting: The Flood by Oliver Vernon

Ekphrastic Free Verse by Bernard Gieske

The Flood

I
I’m a whirling dervish
a dancing microfiche
blazing over the mountains
spewing ideas from many fountains

this broken-down dance
globes floating in space
ready to explode in my face
keep me in a trance

flurries of notions
in constant commotion
so many thoughts breezing around
like buzzing bees abound

often submerged in dreams
it seems nothing is reality
just so many fleeting things
without any finality

from out of the past
memories scattered in my brain
bombarded by external forces
to be sorted and strained

my mind knows no order
or the climbing of ladders
all this pent-up energy
where is the synergy?

out of the flood
will come the blood
of a final
revelation

from the tree of origin
and the spin of its many kin
will come a constant evolution

certainly colorful
quite unexpected
all these skirls beating in time

time will tell
and find the pocket of
apocapated rhyme

with all this can we concur
that with all these odds and ends
there are some beauty dividends?

Oliver Vernon was born in New York in 1972. He received his BFA from Parsons School of Design in 1995, and currently lives and works in Brooklyn. He has exhibited his work in cities all across the United States and internationally. His work is part of numerous collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Visually, Brooklyn based artist Oliver Vernon’s paintings draw upon an incredibly varied pool of influences, from abstract expressionism, to post pop surrealism and the polished finish of figurative realism. Formally, his work is about the deconstruction, and hence the necessary reconstruction of visual space. From this central dichotomy stems many others: logic/illogic, physical/metaphysical, imprisonment/liberation. His paintings come to us, perhaps, as detailed snapshots of the few primordial milliseconds when the blueprint of the universe was being sculpted from the final throes of chaos. In this sense, anything goes. Each painting has it’s own set of rules, or rather the rules are being bent, broken and ultimately formed within each painting. Color, form, energy, architecture, good, evil, flesh and machine are lurking, never as physical entities, but as transient archetypes searching out their final places within the framework of the cosmos. Apart from this macro view, Oliver’s work can be seen at the micro level as well. We can view his paintings as representations of how the mind is formed from a foundation of thought, reason, and aesthetics, and how these entities are simultaneously at odds and interconnected.

Visit Oliver Vernon's web-page:

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