King Ink

Tom Fink had a long conversation with Baz about his book, Learning to Draw, which can be found on Tom Beckett’s excellent blog, ASK/TELL.

Learning to Draw - cover - art by Basil King; design, Rebsie Fairholm

Available on line or inquire at Skylight.

In the meantime, Daniel Staniforth’s blog for Skylight Press generously commented on a previous King book, 77 Beastss: Basil King’s Beastiary,  from Marsh Hawk Press, with these comments.

77 Beasts …is a unique testament by a brilliant visual artist to his relationships — sometimes personal, sometimes intellectual, always artistic, most of the time all three — with our greatest artists whose works he has contemplated and communed with as both draughtsman and painter, and for the last number of years as writer and poet. King’s monumental book is a work that is both art criticism and autobiography, together synthesized into graceful, piercing and gorgeously ephemeral meditations on how art and life are one. King has been known to be a poetic artist. In this book he is a marvelously artistic poet.

77 Beasts - cover art, Basil King; design, Mark Melnick

Also available online or contact Marsh Hawk Press for information

“Nothing’ is the force / That renovates the World”    –Emily Dickinson, by homely gift and hindered Words

I said about nothing

little

only that They guess it’s dark

because light is something

They say most of everything is dark

a push pull dark –

dark speeding up

dark slowing down

currently dark energy equals

seventy percent of everything and it’s gaining

dark matter still has twenty-five

so five percent is the what else we love or not

jusst five the something:  the light, the obdurate rock, the soft skin, all

the matter that is        the famous form of energy.

But only for now

I was right about that

Renovation isn’t balanced or for the moment on a rhyming grid

one nothing swells as the other nothing shrinks

All nothing actions are

nothing in the brain –the state some seek–  a pheromone of fear

or a burst of synaptic joy

We get it really!

Who do you think you are to

know nothing?

to fear nothing

is all there is

To say

there is nothing

to be afraid of

Written after attending the William Bronk Symposium (sponsored by Talisman House and Columbia University, April 13-14, 2012, organized by Burt Kimmelman.

Note on the photograph: it is NGC 6369: The Little Ghost Nebula.  Credit: Hubble Heritage Team, NASA.  From  APOD.nasa.gov (Astronomy photo of the day) – free daily photos. This one, cataloged as NGC 6369, was discovered by Basil’s namesake, the 18th century astronomer William Herschel.  (Yes, his full name is Basil Herschel King.) This nebula in the constellation Ophiucus is relatively faint and has acquired the popular nickname Little Ghost Nebula. Planetary nebulae like this one are, in general, created at the end of a sun-like star’s life as its outer layers expand into space while the star’s core shrinks to become a white dwarf. The white dwarf star, seen near the center of this image, radiates strongly at ultraviolet wavelengths and powers the expanding nebula’s glow. The nebula’s main ring structure is about a light-year across and the glow from ionized oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen atoms are colored blue, green, and red respectively. Over 2,000 light-years away, the Little Ghost Nebula offers a glimpse of the fate of our Sun, which could produce its own planetary nebula about 5 billion years from now.

Items variously on the web:

http://poetryproject.org/multimedia/basil-king-reading-12512.html

for a film of Baz reading “14 Eyes” from his Learning to Draw/A History  at the Poetry Project in New York on January 24, 2012

And for a slideshow I called “The House of Cards grows”

http://www.flickr.com/photos/67642740@N08/sets/72157629262469713/show

The House of Cards - mm/canvas, 7' x 5' -February 2012, c Basil King

We all collected stuff back in 1947, 48, when I was ten or so. Seashells, matchbooks, playing cards.  Playing cards were huge. They were prized for the pictures on the back…we called them trading cards – avidly sorted by categories (sunsets, animals, foreign places)… avidly traded to achieve something – maybe it was large numbers or rareness or some special iconography.

On sale online at etsy.com for $3.95

Tiny lamb, c.1988

Addictive these, the smallness of them, the special-ness they seemed endowed with.  I had more than 200 cards at one point.  Nerdy kids, mostly boys, collected stamps but that was a sanctioned activity.  Our collecting wasn’t adult valued.  Our  stuff wasn’t going to teach us anything or become money-valuable.   It was all about the stuffness of the stuff.  The change of focus to the small.  All collectibles we treasured were small. The possession itself was the power.

I suppose today middleclass children have rooms that look like toyshops. It’s almost an avalanche.  Why would they want other more things?  My sister and I were privileged, but our toys came in singles. A Coca-Cola was six ounces, and we only had them for birthday parties or a special treat after a haircut or a doctor visit.

My sister hoarded tiny ceramic animals–kittens, bear cubs, lambs. Birthdays were a great occasion to enlarge a collection. Charlotte’s school friends would scour nearby dime stores. (Made in China, made in Occupied Japan).

Then our grandmother Aggie sent her one for a birthday,  distinctly uncute, porcelain not bright ceramic – huge by contrast, filing a palm.  A lamb from a Northern Renaissance painting, with ancient dirt she called patina accenting its arched nose, matted wool, deepset sacrificial eyes. (No, not this one, but yes this lamb’s relative.)

Lamb of God, Zubaran. From The Prado's website.

What had Aggie done!  Didn’t she get it.  One more instance of her and her daughter our mother’s stubborn rejection of popular culture.  Those women didn’t listen to the radio, hum popular songs, hell, they didn’t even go to the movies, not Hollywood ones anyway.  All trashy, tacky, mass-market garbage.  It was so difficult growing up with these objectors.

And this lamb!  It was gross, twice the size of any others in Char’s collection, and it would never go on the dainty mirror shelf where her little cuties sat. Why didn’t Aggie get it?

I saw it again, sixty years later, in Charlotte’s bedroom.  Still with its ancient dirt, arched nose, sacrificial eyes.