Poe’s Reign

Oil on Canvas

Somewhat on the darker side, and perhaps a bit hauntingly mysterious, but not macabre. This work could find a comfortable wall, hanging out in the House of the Ushers or certainly the private art collection of Vincent Price.

Perhaps this isn’t the season for a painting, so dark, so moody and so downright capricious. But it is what it is, coming from my mind. Sometimes the art works are logical, intellectual, and filled with conviction. Other times receptiveness and emotions prevail. They can even fizzle. (I don’t scrape or scrap, I paint over).  The fizzlers are triumphs of an unchecked imagination.

Poe’s Reign— a contrivance, looking for a hypocorism (pet name) and it landed its name after collecting its share of studio dust; disquietingly. Is it the preferred name? Is it fashionable? No; the name just sits there for the viewer of the art to be contemplatively amused.

Did Edgar Allan Poe have a reign? The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore can attest to the fact: He lives for all times through the reproductions of his writings. He is; unquestionably, one of America’s greatest poets. The painting Poe’s Reign is a tribute, a homage to one of his most famous poems “The Raven”. Of course my work is greatly humbled by his metrical writing and the emotions his Poem evokes.

The art stands— with its own emotional fixations waiting for the gawkers of judgment.

Is it, “a midnight dreary”? There is no, “stately Raven of the saintly days of yore”, nor is there, “the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore”. What’s in the painting, Poe’s Reign? A whole bunch of “Nevermore”.

“They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night” Edgar Allan Poe