‘Miro and Klee Influence a Painting’ by Tom Gannon Hamilton
Yes and the form once liberated from the laws of physics
and the conventions of decor can create its own ungrounded, untethered place
in the viewer’s imagination…
stimulating synaptic firing and creating new neuropathways
with much the same vitality as lyrical music and dance.
The discovery of, as well as through, Klee and Miro
thus frees the apprehending subject from the representational,
its associative shackles on the one hand, while on the other,
offering refuge
from the psychological desolation many people suffer
when confronted by pure abstraction.
My mother, forever painting under great tutelage:
Arthur Lismer, Kryunsic, Toppham-Brown,
introduced me to both Klee and Miro
before my soul-crushing experience of grade school.
I found as well in Calder’s mobiles, a similar approach to the form,
at once animated and authentic.
I like in your work, the agreement between image delineation and colour choices.
I too am drawn to the language of blue, an entire lexicon unto itself.
Its relationship to white and near-whites — eggshell, plaster, bone
in juxtaposition with material expressions of light such as mustard and yellow ochre,
generate a synergy of comfort for the viewer so the eye feels at home and lingers,
as one might on a desert retreat.
Founder/Curator/Host of the Toronto Urban Folk Art Salon, TG Hamilton has been published in numerous Canadian and international lit.reviews/anthologies. His poem suite El Marillo won 1st prize in the 2018 Big Pond Rumours Chapbook Contest; his book Panoptic (Aeolus House 2018) was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and the Gerald Lampert Award; The Mezzo Soprano Dines Alone was selected for the distinguished John B. Lee Signature Series (Hidden BrookPress 2020). Dr. Hamilton’s MA Thesis (Inside the Words 1984) and PhD dissertation (A Poetics of Possibility, 2001) reflect his lifelong passion for poetry.
Painting by Steven McCabe, done the other day. Water-soluble graphite pencil & acrylic paint + watercolour paint in an 8.5″ X 11″ sketchbook. The Naples Yellow turned ochre-ish blending with graphite.
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