Jane Freilicher: Early New York Evening, 51 1/2 x 31 3/4 inches, 1954

The Still Life and the Landscape: It’s right there as simple as pie, but there is so much to it. The more you gaze the more you see. Delicate irises on a windowsill overlooking brick buildings, windows, more buildings, vivid colors and then, swoosh, you are in the gray with four delicate smokestacks pumping blue smoke into purple haze canopied by a gorgeous blue sky.

Poetry is exciting to me. When I write and the creative juices are flowing, I feel vibrant with energy. This scene is lively; it has energy. There is repetition: the windows, bright in the lighter red building but few in number as opposed to the windows beyond the sill that flow in a diagonal across the lower half of the painting. Each one of these windows is dressed differently just as a poem has repetition that is distinctly unique. I like a poem that has a rhythm flowing through it, and I sense a rhythm in the painting as it cascades across the canvas.

I like an abstract thought or theme – something that is not obvious at first in my poetry. I really want to engage my reader, challenge my reader, and Freilicher has done this with her precision, her attention to detail, her ability to take industrialism and give it beauty. Art stimulates. A reaction or response is the result. Subtly we are changed some “nth” of a degree. That is art.