Art and Illusion
1998; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 21; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/cal.1998.0117
ISSN1080-6512
Autores Tópico(s)Historical Art and Culture Studies
ResumoArt and Illusion Reginald Shepherd (bio) 1 You in the afternoon café, looking through an empty glass as if it were a mirror, curved, recursive like your paintings. Everything you give away is taken back: restraint so possessed implies passion. You in your studio struck by failing light, your childlike reticences and small hands. The canvas fills with indeterminate rectangles, borderless squares, a craving for complexity assuaged by thirteen shades of just one color. Each shape the stretched cloth takes on evades all shape: like us. 2 You wanted the classic white on white, unbounded expanse of snow or sand, and you polar and equipoised in the abstract distance: a flag, a map of nowhere, your utopia. The empty canvas takes in every color, turns each toward its own loss of detail: your pure idea of paint. (No matter how late you work into the night, your hands are always clean.) You wandered the full margin of a blank page, cleanly nuanced as your tone on tone of voice, pigment, or day in which you could find anything whenever you cared to look. The way I [End Page 277] saw expression in the face I called severe: a greed for particulars starved, every unfeatured sky a self-portrait. I scribbled my name in charcoal and you erased it. My fingers tried to leave prints on your world. 3 Titanium, eggshell, antinomy, bismuth; oyster, Paris, chalk, and pearl. You wanted the permanent white that wasn’t for sale, candor which smeared itself across one of our afternoons stigmatized with too much changing light. It blotted out my face, and started over. That was what it meant then to be artists, to be lovers and to never touch. Some water draining from a glass that never meets the lips, oiled water scumbling color in a gutter. We walked half the city looking for that white, or so it seemed. Whether it rains tomorrow or the next day, whether it rains all week (another sky glazed with clouds, solid, insubstantial, another white untitled canvas), the calcimined days are yours. Reginald Shepherd Reginald Shepherd teaches at Northern Illinois University. His first book of poems, Some Are Drowning, won the 1993 Associated Writing Programs’ Award in Poetry. A 1995 recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, he is also author of Angel, Interrupted, a second volume of poems. Copyright © 1998 Charles H. Rowell
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