Petals 2017

 

Petals - The apparition of these faces in the crowd : Petals on a wet, black bough.

Ezra Pound, In a Station of the Metro. 1913.

 

As Ezra Pound did in his groundbreaking poem, Si Bollé tells with Petals the same story of people, strangers whom the poet met by chance in a Paris’ metro station, or Emily Dickinson metamorphosing into a flower: petals, mirrors to the onlooker, complete worlds for the gaze wanting and willing to pierce the trompe l’oeil which is called “painting”, penetrating into layers of acrylic paint and aquarelle on canvas (for it is no more than this) and entering strange worlds which are nothing more than a reflection of one’s own world.
The artist creates the work, the open-minded spectator makes sense of it, and this dialogue turns a painting into a work of art. So many spectators, so many stories, each story being different from the other. Si Bollé’s visual haikus invite the onlooker to call up poetical introspection.

 

A SEPAL, petal, and a thorn

  Upon a common summer’s morn,

A flash of dew, a bee or two,

A breeze

A caper in the trees,—

  And I ’m a rose!

Emily Dickinson, Complete Poems, part two: Nature, XCIII (1924)

 

 

In these spring days,

when tranquil light encompasses

the four directions,

why do the blossoms scatter

with such uneasy hearts?

 

Ki no Tomonori (circa 850 – circa 904, Japan)

 

Of:

Life is a stream 

On which we strew 

Petal by petal the flower of our heart; 

The end lost in dream, 

They float past our view, 

We only watch their glad, early start. 

 

Freighted with hope, 

Crimsoned with joy, 

We scatter the leaves of our opening rose; 

Their widening scope, 

Their distant employ, 

We never shall know. And the stream as it flows 

Sweeps them away, 

Each one is gone 

Ever beyond into infinite ways. 

We alone stay 

While years hurry on, 

The flower fared forth, though its fragrance still stays.

Amy Lowell

 

 

Fingers

 

Every time I look at my hands

with my fingers open on my lap

I am moved

 

Tiny fingers are

pulsating

as if they were petals

of the flowers

that bloomed in me

 

They look proud

They look happy

snuggling with each other

 

As if they had never been forced to do

anything mean

anything despicable

by me

 

Michio Mado

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