Anointed

False king, false prophet; false claims, enchantment. Heavenly voices, humanly fabricated stories. A restorer of peace and a channel to it; disturber of peace and an obstacle to it. Divine justice itself in the form of a person; or, evil-thinking, evil-speaking, evil-doing. Tests of battle, victory; interrogation, heresy. Right at the time, wrong years later. A blazing rise, a dying fall; a burning death, a risen star. Human, Saint; the human person dies, the saintly being shines. History rather than memory igniting interest.

Picture credit: Joan of Arc at the Coronation of Charles VII in the Cathedral of Reims, Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres (source: WikiArt).

See Joan of Arc, A History by Helen Castor. 

Written May 2022.

Embrace

Released from the embrace of art and clasped again in an embrace of politics and history, that of my own country, that of another's, and that of the fifteenth century. History told forwards and learnt backwards. Individuals placed in context of the events that unfolded or are still unfolding – still felt or are of now and may yet be felt by generations to come. Of what are we made? Resistance and violence; joined and severed hands; ill-starred, ill-advised negotiations, enemies-turned-saviours and bogus declarations of peace on which the future stands or falls.

Picture credit: Shadow of the Teacher, 1932, Nicholas Roerich (source: WikiArt).

From journal, May 2022.

Jazz

A final decade, a second life. Things reduced to the simple, yet made profound; resurrected – from death – as a reductionist. Brushes, pencil and charcoal abandoned in favour of coloured paper and scissors. Cut paper like jazz music – improvisational, spontaneous; scissors like a bird in flight, knew what line to take. 'Circuses, folktales, and voyages'; Icarus, a black silhouette, burnt by the sun, with a red circle or star or dot for a heart, tumbling, as myth dictates, to his destruction. Icarus' fate but not Henri Matisse's.

Picture credit: Icarus, Henri Matisse (source: www.metmuseum.org).

From a larger work I call 'The Magician', written May 2022.

See Henri Matisse, A Second Life by Alastair Sooke.