Reviews & Blog

Up Your Eye-Poke-Arsey

Added Mar 11, 2015

 

Old clocks running fast
Beggars consulting menus
Priests scheduling confessions

The guilt ridden sinner arrives late and slits his throat.

Billionaires preaching morality
Anarchists demanding rights
Querulous female cops in army get-ups bent on keeping the peace
Priapic pedophiles beat the rap as the psychologist applauds.

The rich abet the poor to fatten up still more . The poor man’s lard appeases wealthy consciences.

Newspaper eye-bites weave the mantra.
High-jacked grave digger seeks redemption
SPCA hires chicken thief.
Six digit salary CEOs running charitable organizations.

Dumpster divers, pan handlers, can collectors, grocery-snackers, skin carvers, drunks and then the buskers, posers, whores, transfags, pimps and sleeky vendors glad-handing everywhere seeking favour.

A helter skelter and factitious morality.

 A damsel and her pit on a summery afternoon stroll along the boulevard, delicate long anemic ivory skim-milk-white fingers twirl the handle of a pink parasol.

String theorists shooting craps
A diaphanous moonlight veils the evening sky.
The rabbi scuttles hurriedly to Friday prayers then pays a routine visit to his local massage parlour.
And the cock-eyed Cyclops throws another stone, and misses yet again, and blinks, and the fortunate miserable wanderer winks then slinks.

Psychedelic logic breaks the frigid silence with bad noise.

Sleepy felines mind the zone.
The mice were giving a lot of whingeing to the rats.
The mice were thinking the felines might have been fit to run on to the rodents.
But the cats weren’t having any of it.
They remained patiently indifferent.

Rain now coming down hard.
Jaundiced hands cling on to wet rail
I watch the flowing waters.
I miss the ocean waves. I sense they are inviting me to follow them along.
 A mere illusion. But illusions help to keep the soul at peace. And then a slumpy fall and wrinkled skin and green monsters slurping down their bloody mead


For more visit my UP YOURS 

http://www.artsandopinion.com/2014_v13_n2/rotondo.htm

Read More

Up Your Fish Teeth

Added Mar 11, 2015

 

I hobbled along the stony slabbed waterfront where one of the fishers reeled up a two-footer. A trout, by the looks of it, though it might have been a salmon or even an overgrown sardine or a baby tuna perhaps. Not being an ichthyologist, I couldn’t quite be sure as to exactly what kind of fish it was, though it most definitely was a fish. Anyway, the fisher held the fish up by the gills, looked at it in the same way one might inspect a handkerchief after one has blown in it, or straight threw it, as often occurs with paper kerchiefs, or across it, as often occurs with small kerchiefs, or when the kerchief isn’t so small but the nose in question is enormous, or, which would indeed be most unfortunate, both a small kerchie and a cauliflower sized nose, and also depending on the various types of symptoms accompanying the cold, and, not unimportantly, also very much depending on the pulmonary force of the person doing the discharging, as well as the environment in which the nasal releasing is performed; after all, one would not quite expect a dainty mademoiselle of refined pedigree attending a dinner to blow with the same intensity and spirit as a pig-farmer at a he-ha folk festival, and so, having quite deliberately inspected the fish, the fisherman threw the fish my way. For you, he said. As the trout flopped about the pier one of the boatmen yelled out that I should lay my knee on it and pin the slimy thing down, which I did. The helpless creature panted for air, or whatever it is fish pant for when out of water panting , flashing a sharp set of pearly white teeth… Were the teeth extracted from the fish before their heads ended up boiling in the pot? Or were they left to slip off their gums straight into the broth for flavouring?

These questions and my missing socks were enough to keep my mind in a whirl for the better part of the week. For you see my socks had vanished. Now we all of course have had our socks gone missing in the course of our lives. But why of all my socks only the yellow ones. And why had they gone missing -- again.

And were the trout’s teeth left intentionally on its head for flavouring the fish head soup, as I had initially suspected, or might there not perhaps have been some other, more exotic, oriental reason for this strangest of culinary inclusions?

Were the teeth left in as a ‘hardening’ agent . . . for aphrodisiac purposes? Perhaps not as cherished as a rhino’s horn, or porcupine bezoars, or even pangolin flesh, or gecko’s skin, but certainly more accessible to mariners and way way cheaper.

Might this be why over the centuries sailors had acquired such renown as lovers? Is this why the most beautiful Canadian women live in the Maritimes?

Is the sailor’s celebrated virility attributable to fish teeth in his soup and not, as the literature would have us believe, from being months on end out at sea, womanless? In fact one might very well make the case that having been weaned on toothy fish soup our sailors’accented sexual prowess got the gals chasing after them boys so hard their only way out was sailing the high seas.

The more I contemplated the more questions popped to mind, though none as perturbing as the sudden disappearance of my socks. And why only my yellow ones.

From my bed where I lay, sleepless, I glanced searchingly into the offing.

The moon was long past the full, a beautiful round yellow moon, as yellow as my socks when quite suddenly I heard a screech in the night. I gingerly approached the window sill. And there he was. Don. My Chinese acrobat neighbour swinging from my clothes line. But of course, it now all made perfect sense . . . all those hours at the gym, honing his acrobatic skills . . . to steal my socks -- no doubt attracted by their colour to match his complexion? It would never have occurred to me had I not seen him with my own eyes.

And they say crosswords sharpen the mind? Rubbish. It's scrabble for me from here on out.

Or did the fisherman throw the fish at me cause he thought I might need a little toothy fish soup of my own to energize what he interpreted as an otherwise less than seaworthy masculinity?

Questions and more questions. Damn me and when I get to try linking words up.

And what if yellow socks, for some strangest of reasons, were as desirable to the oriental persuasion as the seal’s dried penis?

No. No bloody way. No more doing with word-link of any sort, no more. 

Scrabble's out as well I thought to myself, sniffing at my last remaining pair of yellow socks


For more visit my UP YOURS 

http://www.artsandopinion.com/2014_v13_n2/rotondo.htm

Read More

Aerial Abstracts, Panoram Italia, August 2014

Added Sep 10, 2014

My inspiration could arise from something as trivial as a wet pebble on a beach, or a sulking donkey, or the rusty hull of an abandoned boat dry docked by the side of a lake, or even a young she goat frolicking about in the meadows.It’s all out there.

The palette of every artist is nature.

Themes? I am not as concerned with themes as I am with putting something together pleasing to the eye. If the work should invite viewers to revisit the seemingly ordinary with renewed interest, all the better. But this is purely incidental. I am not out to tell stories, provide morals, correct past wrongs or in any way change the world any more than the musician.

And as in music, whose beauty transcends significance, so with art. A painting need not mean anything for it to touch us. A piece of marble is beautiful not because we recognize something in it we can name, but because of its harmonious blend of colouring, texture and form. Art is in fact all the finer when it means absolutely nothing.

Style? When the artist leans too heavily on acquired technique style becomes imprisoning, and the work annoyingly repetitive.

Myself, I like changing it around. I am not a cookie cutter artist. When I become too comfortable in a genre I grow bored and go elsewhere. An artist must be an explorer, never for long content with his newly found abode, always pushing further, and absolutely never producing to please an audience . . . .or he’s no artist at all, at best perhaps a craftsman or a cook.

Which is why I prefer not to be pigeonholed stylistically.

What now? I am currently working on a series of aerial paintings. I was flying over the Prairies last spring. It was a clear crisp day. Not a cloud up in the skies. Below all was flat. Nothing recognizable. Not the silos, not the farms, not the produce of the fields, not the combines, trucks and barns. Nothing down under except for a seemingly erratic coloured patchy quilt, as only mother nature can weave. You asked for a source of inspiration? Well this was definitely one.

Where to next? I was thinking of going up to the Yukon . I love the sparse silent vastness of our Canadian hinterland, where light travels unimpeded towards ever distant sun-splashed horizons. And the way the skyline subtly blends with water and land in explosive hues of light vibrating colour. Yeah, I think I’ll be painting abstract north-scapes sometime soon.

Read More

review

Added Sep 10, 2014

PANORAM'ITALIA, AUGUST 2014

Read More

Arts and Opinion, April 2008

Added Mar 16, 2009

A critique of Abstract Art with one of artist's works in question

Read More

Plaisir de Vivre, March -April, 2007 Vol. 18. No 1

Added Mar 16, 2009

2 works by artist exhibited

Read More

Arts and Opinion, Vol 3 No 2., 2004 The Roamers

Added Mar 16, 2009

A review of artist's Roamers Series by editor in chief Robert Lewis

Read More

Parcours, 2002, vol 8 No 3 .Roberto Rotondo et la renaissance de la lumiere.

Added Mar 16, 2009

A critique of the artist's work by editor in chief Robert Bernier

Read More

GAM 2002 April May

Added Mar 16, 2009

A critique of portraiture

Read More

Chateleine, april 2000

Added Mar 16, 2009

Landscape for Dupont of canada

Read More

©2024 Roberto Romei Rotondo | Sitemap |
Powered by Artmajeur