GAUL STONES

How many times do we have to start over?
Where is the wind when it leaves the trees?
How far away are the Straights of Dover?
What becomes of the burdened pleas?

Where is the viewpoint in apocalypse?
Doesn’t the smoke burn deep in your eye?
Why do the singing through the eclipse?
What happens when lessons intensify?

Who counsels the legions each day at dawn?
What happens to lifelines left untied?
From where sail the vessels into San Juan?
Why do the four leggeds know when to hide?

How do the sisters know what to say?
How do the brothers know when to fight?
What becomes of the light after day?
Where do the clouds drift during the night?

Copyright 2005- Jeffrey Frisch

ASH DAWN

While driven carriage suns slowly down their fiery drink
Returning to a solar-lunar cross the skies night race
Sand timing from 10 centuries took place in just a blink
Another world is seething with tenders in its place

Their white bread still traditional looks south toward Hawkers Point
Their home address the land they found beneath 3 jagged rocks
Near the Regent’s reign of narrative needed to anoint
The strip-mined avocation that was never Antioch’s

Earned Cadillac’s and heart attacks across the West Atlantic
Bloom thorny garden flowers of pejorative old time swagger
Harvard Princeton Yale and Army sweat to be pedantic
And never see the last device their next to final stagger

External and extinct inflamed with tested trimming
The population voted twice declaring the adored
Ignoring all overlooked antagonism brimming
10 centuries of screaming proof who might be truly Lord

Copyright 2004 - Jeffrey Frisch

LOVE PSALM

I don’t remember my first spirit pipes
My forefathers’ legacy mountains apart
I don’t recall tracing restless stripes
But winning the race to my loved one’s heart

She’s the second a moment turns to forever
Anything’s everything all counterpart
Hearthside warmth morning rain weather
Our each eyes shine new world songs start

Our ocean’s protected our ancients the hill
The ones before our lives bless us abound
Both ancestors’ spirits sit peaceful and still
See shining down smiling our pathway is found

The old ones from ages and wise ones yet come
Join together our spirits flying blue sky
Help dance us together our spirit drum
Spreading through worlds our love from Kauai

The realm of wordWork

ROTHKO & DA VINCI’S MOTHER


We researched grains of afterglow noon
Storing the Sistine heart’s know-it-all fire
Secret doors closing too permanent soon
Releasing for free our ninth half empire

Your bittersweet burn triggered ways pre-focal
Those soft-noted colors of warm wine and rum
Wrapped-up precocious your feeling’s pre-vocal
My time’s still running where you come from

You come from my mountains my deserts my trees
From wide open spaces of water and smoke
Try pleasing the barber sits poor Damocles
His music begins from his final down stroke

Tarpaper houses naked by scales
Remember the shyness Aquinas lacks
Off-roading over lost logging trails
In worthless sedan chairs almost Pontiac’s

All people that lived here before the white man
Never tested karma with a painters veto
Your painted desert never told the Cheyenne
Delegate ink while its still incognito

Copyright 2004 Jeffrey Frisch

Saturday at the Art LA and LA Art Fairs

The two LA International Art Fairs in Santa Monica this weekend were night and day different, and seeing both in one day was sensory overload. Starting at Art LA, it was all contemporary work, about materials, Postmodern fracturing of anything and everything, and experimental techniques (e.g., painting on roofing slates that are laced together as an art book). There were also great paintings by several top-notch living artists (e.g., Tom La Duke of LA, Kim Dingle of NY, and Adrian Ghenie of Romania). However, my favorite artist discovery was Caetano de Almeida of Brazil, a 3rd or 4th generation Modernist with just a small Postmodernist tweak of fracturing here and there. Presented by the LA Kontainer Gallery were six of his semi-woven grid paintings on mylar (e.g., see photo) that were both formal and edgy, clearly hand-made without computer assistance, and with gorgeous color. He also had four smaller minimalist, geometric paintings so technically clean that the quirky tilts of the rectangles are almost not noticed. His $5K-20K prices were still out of reach for most of the dressed-down crowd.
Going next to the LA Art Fair, it was big-time everything. Twice as many cars, people, galleries, wine bars, dealers, freebies and elbows. Lots of traditional art (e.g., California plein air, European Impressionism and Modernism, yesterday’s quality painters and today’s name artists), with sticker shock prices (nothing overtly over $1M). Something for each taste, eye candy all over, and lots of red dots on the labels. This year also added the LA Prints Show that was so jammed with beautiful works, it was difficult to leave without being tempted. So if you love art and cannot make it this year to all the other international art fairs in Europe, Asia, NYC, etc., then these LA art fairs are a bargain and quite informative about what is in the art market these days. On Sunday, why not try an escape from a world recession or War on Terrorism?