The canvas below is a favorite of those who walk through my Seven Buffaloes Studio here in Big Timber.
The Lavender Fields Art Coelho ©
The Lavender Fields represents a change in my work. Especially in the sense of how European landscapes dominate my major work. I’ve done more canvases on Provence, this small region in Southern France, than I have done in all of my American paintings combined. Maybe my soul has an Old World culture thriving in it. This began when I started painting Azorean canvases in 1982 when João Afonso, the Terceira poet and scholar sent me my first color photography books of the Azores.
There’s not much of any of my work, maybe none of it, which connects to these modern times. For instance if I found something Twentieth Century appearing in one of my photographic models of my canvases on Provence, I’d weed it out immediately. I like the innocence of landscape and the feelings workers have towards their labor, which has nothing do with modern machinery or modern tools. Anything mechanized in my rural scenes is taboo. There better be a horse pulling a harvester or a hand scythe somewhere or the subject matter becomes dead in my spirit. In this regard you can look at a Vincent Van Gogh painting-the last one he did just before he died was in 1890; and my work timeframe wise fits into that 19th century ambiance. I have coined a phrase that fits the men and the women who have sweat pouring from their brows when they are hard at their toiling in the fields or vineyards. I call it The Sweating Professions.
The poem Vincent, a Gladiator of Soul is another kind of homage. I was more inspired to write about Van Gogh in Provence than at any other time. Because here both his chosen world to paint in, and his human condition collided; left him more tragically exposed. And after he did his last painting, Black Crows over a Wheat Field, he went home, put a pistol to his gut, shot himself, took out his pipe and smoked it till his brother Theo arrived on a train from Paris. Theo was the only wanted who supported him financially and spiritually in his lifetime; and he died six months later.
Vincent, a Gladiator of Soul
(for Vincent Van Gogh)
Vincent’s wall distills
a forgotten cell inside
St-Paul-de-Mausole’s sanctuary;
the final dust that haunts
his barred windows where
irises once soared
for inspiration
in a captured spirit
splitting hairs of madness.
His heart reached
for brush tips in
a speck of eternity,
a gladiator of soul.
Truth on its knees
with no one to please
but himself, or maybe
a seasoned bar whore,
or a little girl
with a red ribbon
in the garden posing
with an immortality
she never knew possible.
Or sunflowers leaving
him speechless. An old
pairs of shoes, the
humility that drives
one beyond for grace.
It’s all there where
courage’s price of color
can never honestly erase
a song a planter surrounds;
the light bursting like
a lamb’s eyes glowing
with the sun’s gold for
every whim-blessed floundering
of pride’s commitment to sow.
The olive groves
take torment’s roots
to a survivor’s clutching
hand to somehow last;
the mistral dance blew
hard as his torn ear
against isolation’s rasp.
The double-timing ghosts
blowing sideways taps
at the seams without
one smile from sorrow,
except in a peasant’s eyes.
And rolling ripe as wheat
his palette speaks
the solitude of all creation,
a man’s crossed arms that weeps.
(Unpublished poem)
Art Coelho
January 2010
artcoelho@cablemt.net www.artcoelho.com
P.O. Box 249, Big Timber, Montana 59011
