Two years ago I wrote a diary called “Poet, Painter, Journalist—Life with a Litterateur” to commemorate the anniversary of my late father’s birth. Back then I didn’t know how to add photographs but, having learned a few things in the meantime, I thought I’d show you the photographs my husband took of my late father Edward’s paintings.
During the years we lived in Little Rock (1956–1960), my father discovered he could augment his income by attending school at night on the G.I. Bill. He chose to attend art school, where he experimented with oils, pastels, and pointillism, among other techniques. As subjects, he chose the poems he loved the most.
Here’s a photo of Edward in his Army uniform. After Pearl Harbor he, like many other young men, joined the armed services to fight for his country. He would have been 20 years old in 1942, when this photo was taken.
Please follow me into the salon to see examples of his work.
My father considered John Keats to be in the first rank of English poets, along with Shakespeare, Milton, and Shelley. For his first painting, which he did in oils, he chose a scene from "La Belle Dame Sans Merci."
La Belle Dame Sans Merci
Oh what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.
I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful - a faery's child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.
I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A faery's song.
For his next subject, Edward chose to work in pastels, creating a scene called "The Clay Population" from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. At night, after the potter has closed his shop and gone home, the pots come to life and talk among themselves.
KUZA-NAMA
Listen again. One evening at the close
Of Ramazán, ere the better Moon arose,
In that old Potter's Shop, I stood alone
With the clay Population round in Rows.
And, strange to tell, among the Earthen Lot
Some could articulate, while others not:
And suddenly one more impatient cried--
"Who is the Potter, pray, and who the Pot?"
Then said another--"Surely not in vain
My substance from the common Earth was ta'en,
That He who subtly wrought me into Shape
Should stamp me back to common Earth again."
Another said--"Why, ne'er a peevish Boy
Would break the Bowl from which he drank in Joy;
Shall He that made the Vessel in pure Love
And Fancy, in an after Rage destroy!"
None answer'd this; but after Silence spake
A Vessel of a more ungainly Make:
"They sneer at me for leaning all awry;
What! Did the Hand then of the Potter shake?"
Edward's next project was a pointillist illustration of Shelley's famous sonnet, "Ozymandias."
Ozymandias
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away".
I'm not quite sure of the technique employed in the following painting, which he called "The Spiral Nebula." It looks a lot like colored paste applied with a sharp-angled brush. As for the poem that inspired it, I can only guess. Perhaps it was Francis Thompson's "In No Strange Land."
In No Strange Land
O world invisible, we view thee,
O world intangible, we touch thee,
O world unknowable, we know thee,
Inapprehensible, we clutch thee!
Does the fish soar to find the ocean,
The eagle plunge to find the air--
That we ask of the stars in motion
If they have rumor of thee there?
Not where the wheeling systems darken,
And our benumbed conceiving soars!--
The drift of pinions, would we hearken,
Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors.
"Wheeling systems" would certainly seem to apply to this one.
And for his final project, my father chose a short excerpt from Kierkegaarde, sometimes known as "the father of existentialism." The quotation he lettered so painstakingly has inspired me all my life.
It is very dangerous
to go into Eternity with possibilities which one has oneself
prevented from becoming realities. A possibility
is a hint from God. One must follow it.
In every man there is latent the highest possibility;
it must be followed. If God does not
wish it then let HIM prevent it,
but one must not hinder oneself.
Trusting to God,
I have dared but I was not
successful; in that is to be found
peace, calm and confidence in God.
I have not dared:
that is a woeful thought,
A torment in Eternity.
Søren Aaby Kierkegaard:
Journals.
After my father’s sudden death from a heart attack in August 1980, my mother took his paintings and hung them on the walls of her house in Virginia. When she died in 2008, they passed to me; they now hang on the walls of my dining room and living room.
I see them every day of my life, and when I look at them I think of Edward and his enormous, abiding love of English literature. He passed that love down to me, and what a gift it was!
Thank you, Dad. Whatever dimension you inhabit now, may your soul be at rest.