Reggie Hart

disparate - fuse - image

Develop a taste for concrete deer with embedded antlers Then! Moulting lasts a thousand years.

The last two lines intermingle

disparate-fuse-image

the last word forms the glue to bind the

image. Sometimes

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This excerpt is from the last poem I would ever write, Is Poetry, back in 1994. My decade’s long fixation with poetry had run its course. I was spent. Empty. I wandered from job to job until I finally got on a plane and headed for Korea.

I immersed myself in my daily routine. Work. Home. Work. Then, acting on a lifetime of desire and artistic compulsion, I picked up a paintbrush in the spring of 2005 and almost immediately became maniacal, fanatical: frantically scattering colors and forming shapes...

Hurried, hungry, and insatiable, my obsession haunts my dreams and occupies every waking moment...

I paint. I go to my day job. Then I come home and paint again. Faceless, nameless, disparate-fuse-image, I paint because I need to extract what is not there.

The repetition of color and shape. The sharp lines contrasting with soft, subdued transitions. An element of obligation, a false order, an absence of the chaotic and the imposition of the human, stand in stark contrast to the pastoral underpinnings that have become the main elements in my work. Acrylic, plastic, shiny, and fixed: these are my children, my passion, and my poetry.

The Thrifty Painter,하트 (Reggie Hart) was born in Canada and currently lives in Korea.