The Memory - A Magpie Tale

"The Moth And The Lamp" offered for a creative prompt by Tess for The Mag 187. To join with and enjoy this week's Magpie Tales writing group *click here*

Thank you, Tess, for introducing me to this young man's work.

Cesar Santos (b.1982) is a trained artist working in oils on linen, as he says, his favorite media these days. (At least in the days he wrote of it for his website) He is Cuban American raised in Florida and an internationally trained artist, trained in the manner of the old masters and as well in modern venues. He thus boldly positions near photographic perfection in backgrounds which can be fully impressionistic and even surrealistic. Often he will mix the representational with the surreal in ways that tangle them together in knots of beautiful fantasy.

Sometimes he will offer up modernized versions of the paintings done by the masters easily recognized as both the old and the new. He favors female nudes but also produces landscapes and works featuring many other subjects. To illustrate how a man's art can imitate his life, Cesar is also well trained in mixed martial arts and he fights well enough to earn awards, not a usual activity for a deeply realized artist. As I looked at the work he chose for display on his website *click here* I found a great sympathy for his vision rise up inside me. I especially appreciate his mastery of the old forms. I wish I had the discipline for it. I feel quite at home with his fearless blending of figure and ground, which I have so often used in my own work, a skill that I started to explore in art, poety and music in 1968.

The Memory

She caught the room's light,
in a hazy afterglow
hung low where she could
reach and draw it in,
and lifting herself up, wings
strapped on, bare breasted,
she set one foot free,
the slipper dropping away
like unpleasant truths
should fall from us all,
like drab walls and dirty glass
should be blacklisted,
and possibly burned.

Then she curled around her source,
and she mourned her son.

September 22, 2013 12:29 PM