The Art League Gallery

Someone has framed the primal detritus of life slipping just
below the surface, bubbling in decay. No humans gawking
except at these canvases, their wine purpling in plastic glasses,
bits of cheese falling like deciduous sayings, an “Ahh,” an “Ooh”
gentle as the breeze leaning salt grass to the tide. Sunsets. More
marshes. Their creators a retired dentist. A silver-haired CEO.
A widow with two labradors. A music teacher’s clumps of
spartina, egrets settling behind them, fair and soft spoken
as greeting cards in Walgreeen’s. They’re beginners who’ve lived
long enough to want the world tactile beyond harm. To show
faint yellows in a Provençal landscape, a mill pond reflecting
the unshuttered windows of their youth. Take this “Moment in
Time,” by a former magistrate, the years of her South Dakota
winters blown out between the palmettos on either side of a lagoon,
the sea hinted at in the distance grown cerise with sinking vagaries
of the sun, like the appeals of those who appeared before her,
facts as calm as the still life of pears. The bland faults of ridged
impasto and jarring colors the not yet broken habits of a lifetime’s labor.

John Allman | Mudlark No. 31
Contents | Dream