Some think Picasso a star, so go for him, or it could be Leonardo who made Mona Lisa smirk in his famous work, perhaps Banksy, as popular as pizza, or Michelangelo, his Sistine ceiling aglow, or Monet who gilded his canvases with lilies. You might give a whoop for Andy Warhol’s soup, or moustachioed Dali’s salad of metaphors, admire Lucien Freud, that old grouch who posed a large woman asleep on his couch, or Rembrandt whose figures burnish the gloom, or Vermeer’s captured light in a still room. Some might give a wave to Hokusai, or why not Turner’s atmospheric palette, maybe someone sterner, Goya aghast at the bloodshed of war, images of slaughter raw, or Whistler who memorialised his mother, while others may opt for Renoir whose dames danced joyous in France where Van Gogh razored part of his ear, loved scenes, golden starburst, his brother tried to sell, now so dear; our artists’ ways of recording time, colour fantastic from drastic to sublime.
Ian C Smith’s work has appeared in, Amsterdam Quarterly, Australian Poetry Journal, Critical Survey, Live Encounters, Poetry New Zealand, Southerly, & Two-Thirds North. His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide). He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, and on Flinders Island, Tasmania.