Third Monday with Bob Boldt

The art of painting (verse)

By Bob Boldt





The heavy drape is rumpled loosely back.
We are invited to view creation.
Here an empty chair has been provided
for an observer, patron, or voyeur.
We draw back farther the heavy curtain
and willingly leave our modern time
for what we think is Vermeer’s stable life.
Why such passion in this our modern age
to enter and to rest our eyes a while,
serene within this ordered universe
of softlit rooms, amid the brick-a-brack,
virginals, maps, and portraits of his town?

His age was hardly better than our own,
with Christian soldiers at each other’s throat
thirsting for infidels’ unholy blood.
The lovely model with her laurel wreath—
does her serenity mask thoughts of fear
or desire for a dashing soldier?

In this room is contained the lively dance
of images within images. Two
centuries before Magritte’s famous pipe,
Vermeer understood well the illusion
of misplaced concreteness. As if to make
the point, he has painted for us a map
of a map that tells us we are here—now.

Yes, this room is definitely calmer.
Here is no flickering canvas painting
and repainting sixty times a second
the portrait of a babbling Megyn Kelly
every evening at 5:30,
or a rude fifteen notes from Beethoven’s
9th Symphony announcing a cell call.

For all his carefully ordered order
present in his canvasses, our Vermeer
died in a tragic, bankrupt now, bereft
of health, immortality, and lacking
even the money he squandered on his
lavish colors with which he imbued those
scenes with his bright pigments of captured light.

But that is seven years in the future.
For now his brush is drawn back, suspended—
paused between palette and canvas—reposed
in the afternoon light—that light that shines
through all his illuminated paintings.

In that second from pallet to canvas
is contained all moments and lasts forever
in the frozen air above the model
and in the brush paused above the canvas.
Framed herein is a creation, fragile,
and yet as irrevocable as the
gaze of that plaster mask on the table.

Copyright © 2015 by Bob Boldt