Down the Old Bog Road: Frances Crossan Blanchard

October 14, 2021

---

Our first Guest Curator Kim Fahner writes about the work of her friend Frances Blanchard. “When you stay in O’Neill Cottage, you see Frances sitting in front of you, but then can feel and sense a group of ancestors standing all around her, thanking her for bringing that homestead back to life. Her paintings, then, are full of details that conjure up stories of her family and the land they lived on.” Click for more!

Read More

Dance With Desire

May 8, 2021

---

Irving Layton, Dance With Desire, Selected Love Poems with Drawings by Richard Gorman, 1992

It’s interesting to consider the vagaries of cultural history: what falls in and out of the community mind, and how something that was once a touchstone of cultural discourse may be forgotten. Dance with Desire (Selected Love Poems) by Irving Layton, with illustrations by the late Canadian artist Richard Gorman is notable in this light. Layton (1912 – 2016) offers poems that are often blunt and unflinching, whether about desire or despair in the realms of love and lust (‘...your unopened / Brittle beauty troubles an aging man / Who hobbles after you a little way / Fierce and ridiculous’). Comparisons to Catullus are appropriate. Gorman (1935 – 2010) intersperses and augments the text, with monochromatic, frenetic drawings, aswirl and emotional: one might see faces and forms, of lovers, perhaps entangled or trying to remove themselves from the fray. This was published by Porcupine Quill’s Press and Lake Galleries (the latter producing an additional 110 copies with numbered and signed prints by Gorman, as a limited edition artwork in book form). You can purchase it here. ~ Bart Gazzola

Read More