BOBBIE RUSSON
New Paintings

Please join us, and  the artist, for the opening evening Saturday 17 June 6-8 p.m.

 

There was an apple tree in the yard—
this would have been
forty years ago—behind,
only meadows. Drifts
of crocus in the damp grass.
I stood at that window:
late April. Spring
flowers in the neighbor’s yard.
How many times, really, did the tree
flower on my birthday,
the exact day, not
before, not after? Substitution
of the immutable
for the shifting, the evolving.
Substitution of the image
for relentless earth. What
do I know of this place,
the role of the tree for decades
taken by a bonsai, voices
rising from the tennis courts—
Fields. Smell of the tall grass, new cut.
As one expects of a lyric poet.
We look at the world once, in childhood.
The rest is memory.

Nostos by Louise Glück

One night, when
you return to your childhood
home after
a lifetime away,
you’ll find it abandoned.  Its
paint will be
completely weathered.
It will have a significant westward lean.
There will be
a hole in its roof
that bats fly out of.
The old man
hunched over
at the front door
will be prepared
to give you a tour,
but first he’ll ask
Scary, or no scary?
You should say
No scary.

Scary No Scary by Zachary Schomburg

 

Bobbie Russon Mother Rabbit, Little Cat, Grandma’s House, The Comforter Oil on Board 17 x 13 cm. (with sapele frames)  £1,200 ea.

And as if the poet herself had been looking at Bobbie’s work…..

I wanted to stay as I was
still as the world is never still,
not in midsummer but the moment before
the first flower forms, the moment
nothing is as yet past-

not midsummer, the intoxicant,
but late spring, the grass not yet
high at the edge of the garden, the early tulips
beginning to open-

like a child hovering in a doorway, watching the others,
the ones who go first,
a tense cluster of limbs, alert to
the failures of others, the public falterings

with a child’s fierce confidence of imminent power
preparing to defeat
these weaknesses, to succumb
to nothing, the time directly

prior to flowering, the epoch of mastery

before the appearance of the gift,
before possession.

Louise Gluck  The Doorway

And finally…. it is that time of year again. Rush hour on the Kennet and Avon Canal…
(There are six cygnets…)