The works are displayed in the Amelia Douglas Gallery and next door, adorning the walls of the Lora C Muir Performing Arts Theatre.

I guess his imagination goes into high flux on the weekends when he is temporarily liberated from his stressful day job. And perhaps it is a safety valve to let out some steam in a creative way, time permitting.”

- joe rosenblatt

- rob farrow

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I Want To Hijack A Bumblebee

I want to hijack a bumblebee

& fly over th’ marigold

home to where the fires begin

In the orange moonlight

I’ll reset th’ buzz machine’s speedometer,

start from zero in th’ centre

& when Death signals from his control tower

I’ll take my flight out in the morning

——————————————————

Blue Muse

The enemy is moving toward her milking machine.

The dwarf blue cow lets fly her tail

& a foreign rogue is lost in the blue rippling fresh.

O beast of feminine power, mother of the blue muse

your tits will be beatified in the underworld

where you appear in my daydreams

darting around the crevices…

I can see all your resources, all your milk

I believe you’re pregnant with blue metaphor.

——————————————————

VII

And what is flesh but a disguise

for women in narrow tapestries,

celestial gowns – beguiling skins?

Let us unzip this pure garment, unzipper,

allow the hipless flames to slip away…

again those legs they drop,

turn into a dry cistern

deeper than a hiss of Slumber’s Serpent.

Touched by First Breath, the vibrating Lady

length by length, spills out a careful tongue

flickering thru leaves, easy spiral,

strips off her image, Her Majesty

pushed into a sinuous whisper – yours in bondage

an umbilical thought slinking among lost apples.

——————————————————

Blue Movie

Silhouettes press against the windows. Evening oblongs rove intimately exploring pulses, riffles and cross-currents. A blue swallow-tail spirals down an invisible staircase. The lady in blue shakes her hipless middle. A curious shark follows her rhythms like a sailor at a sleazy bar. The dance implies come on sailor, try me.

Fade out. The scene changes. A grasshopper materializes. The creature has swung out too far over the edge, toppling into the drink. In seconds the winged racer disintegrates into a red vapour.

I’ll see you at the Club Top Hat. Green residue flutters away and the film now concentrates on a pore in the river. Our shark clicks to the other side of the stream. There’s an infernal logic here to match the intelligence of any fly fisherman. If one grasshopper has missed the landing field then there has to be a hundred who’ll take a dive. It is only a matter of waiting.

The shark yawns… soothing to have water rush up against the bruised gums; the Little Qualicum is an oral hygienist… cleaning away corpses. The shark inhales acres of winged souls. The porno reel is still humming in his hyperactive brain. His grey sky fills with a rare intelligence.

——————————————————

AND THEN THE PURRING EARTH BEGINS TO MOVE

Gardens are sometimes cats that sleep

late into a summer’s afternoon

and when evening finally arrives

each tabby, released from its delicious nap

unwinds like a snake on some downy bed.

Rising like famished spectres they inhale

swarms of dancing dragonflies.

Pulsing through a night that wears

only itself for funeral clothes

my frightened soul, a woodland moth

flutters across some familiar agate eyes.

And then the purring earth begins to move

extending a gentle paw for me to rest

while my eyelids close upon each wing.

——————————————————

THE KISS

I jig a chrome-plated idol to invite

those devoted lips of a spiny rockfish

and when my line trembles in the dark

above a shining ballroom floor

the kiss explodes into a frantic dance

a glutton spirals with my sacred lure

inside a cabaret with its pulsing orchestra

where ghostly waitresses shimmy to the tables.

Bubbling like minnows who offer minuscule grace

to bless their living meals in a refectory,

words swim into my deeper aquarium of sleep;

they nibble a command through the sediment

“Angler, reel up the beast… you’ve won…

you’ve set the hook… she’s yours to keep.”

——————————————————

KID POETRY

Remember

the blood coursing through the ineffectual body

the dispersion of voices through the wind

& the fall of the phantom self into the spider’s home

the darkness creeping on tireless feet toward

two drowning eyes in a sea of topaz ink

The ink of poetry, the ritual

of the fever

the shoes of the self on the move without feet

the feeling of pillows of air, forms without stomachs

It’s all in the past now, all numb

remember the blood in the spineless comedian,

Mister Mystic

yes, Kid Poetry on his bleached ego horse

The girls laugh

laugh

laugh

their breasts sing

Hi is the world

the world is a toy on a thin string

Weeds of poetry sprout from a toothless mouth

——————————————————

XIV

The body you think you own is not your own,

is a rented tuxedo where you shine

like nuptial ants inside some pleasure dome

lifting molecules above their mind….

Transporting glitter at your wedding

the self you think you own is your tuxedo

till shadows lower it by parasol

to a beach polluted with tadpoles and panama hats.

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GENETIC MATERIAL

Lines extend from a nucleus of form. In my drawings personalities grow exactly like limbs. Just as in real life a polliwog changes into an adult amphibian, a drawing’s protolimbs proliferate, gaining meatier dimensions, and bloom into a shape. Those creatures in my landscape carry my genetic material.

Often I will come up with a title days after the drawing is completed. Or the reverse – a title emerges before I even start the drawing. In my mind the landscape with its intricacies is there germinating, waiting to sprout up from the cerebral soil. The drawing paper demands its form. It wants to be fed and craves for limbs – and perhaps a spiritual envelope called the soul.

——————————————————

A BLIND DATE

Anxious as a drumming moth teasing an alabaster flame

an honest mouth in heat vibrates through a murky veil

“Minnow girl, I cannot give you back your tiny heart -

my precious, you lost it to me, it was love, dear child.

Throbbing like a love-sick eel yearning for the moon

you were inhaled by a whisper in the bedroom… gone

a silver pulse… you fluttered slower than my nibble;

and now only a memory grinds the flesh of our mad affair

for you were more than just a glow passing in the night

lonely for a bit of dinner conversation… and a dance

Say, who’s knocking on my door, and calling out my name?

It’s checkout time at this hotel, but I’ll be sleeping in

past noon, and dreaming of a blind date with another minnow.

Go, tidy up some other room… no, I won’t vacate my dream!”

—————————————————— ——————————————————

10 Poems by Rob Farrow

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preamble

images hang from landscapes

like cherries hang from cherry trees

or picturesques from old Cape Cod

I imagine an Inuit chipping away at his soapstone

to free the walrus trapped inside

the first step is to sharpen the sensibilities –

any good stone will do

hunger will work or Hinduism…

…but you have to be careful though,

the trick is to dislodge the truth

without re-inventing it

the artist as hunter-gatherer

& stone age warrior

the imagist paratrooper fighting reality TV

& political correctness

——————————————————

granville island market

ultramarine mountains in endless ribbons
dissolve into the pastel
blue of an overcast sky

a corrugated metal roof
bisects the horizon
with utilitarian precision

in the market
the right-angled triangles
that the buildings make
are all decked out
in primary colours -

are busy with stripes &
solids against the spring sky

& all this geometry
seems to coax
a tentative, coastal sun
to burn the very edges of things…

——————————————————

musical comedy

Serenade the Hapsburgs
with your gatling guns
God Save our King
from their effeminate music -

Salute your germanic cousins with a kiss
& coax our golliwogs into their frauleins
we’ll foul their bloodlines
with our blackface jazz

O’ poison their schnitzel
& rot their sauerkraut
we’ll dance the charleston
on their chemists’ graves

Great uncle Archie was blackmailed
with white feathers
& his entrails mixt with French soil
to make compost for the poppies…

…at least he avoided embarassment…

——————————————————

toronto

the miracle of photosynthesis

voracious, high-cheekboned girls
process spinach leaves & liebfraumilch -
titillate accountants &
fresh-faced busboys with dirty fingernails

the doctors’ wives drink dacquiris
& have chocolate mousse for dessert -
their enthusiasm drowns out
the tick tick ticking of decay…

——————————————————

uncle john’s farm

rectangles & rectangles of immature barley
and blossoming yellow rape make a patchwork

an antique stallion straddles the horizon watching me
or the blue Ford tractor I am coaxing across the alfalfa
in the afternoon heat his outline is oscillating

at sunset five or six grain elevators repeat themselves
lengthwise along the railway tracks -
the sun is a bright copper colour in the metal

my aunt said that the way the clouds form
makes it beautiful…

——————————————————

anthem

I am the fruition

the haphazard shaking down

of nucleic acid

the slipshod lusting

of sequential orangutans

it is the focal point of the galaxy

on which I sit

the true north strong and free!

——————————————————

across a field of far snow

across a field of far snow

a lone figure moves silently

at his face,

an irregular patch of sky

with the corner of his eye

he imagines a flight of blue birds

——————————————————

a metaphor for maria

(from her husband)

she’s not so beautiful as the checkout girl

picked green

& pushed with hormones

she’s luscious, sweet

as a tree-ripened peach

warmed in an okanagan sun

she tastes good to me

& drips with juice

——————————————————

confessional

i am gone

back to comix

am i strung out

on krypton?

can i resist

eighteen inch biceps?

i am gone

back to cowboys

& a dream

of slow, white horse

am i under oath?

i confess

to a thirteen year old’s

small, wet deviation

——————————————————

the way the wind tastes

the way the wind tastes, pleases me

I like the alpine flowers

the ones I don’t know the names of

the twisted shapes of hemlock & cypress

the sticky smell of the balsam

in september, the blueberries

please me

here I will build a house of good cedar

I will make it big with industry!

The product of words multiplied by image, is increased depth of field. The image works in parallel with the words that define the image – and each is stronger and more focused as a result. Or put another way: the effect is greater than the sum of it’s parts. That is the meaning of synergy…..

Rob Farrow – (cell) 778.389.5992 – (email) rafdigital@gmail.com

At college one of my english professors – the poet Peter van Toorn – made a reference to painting and the importance of the frame. The frame determines what is in and what is out. In a landscape the artist frames a scene and decides what is in and what is out. The determination of what to exclude is just as important – and says just as much about the artist – as does the decision to include certain elements of a scene.

In the words of William Carlos Williams “so much depends upon a red wheelbarrow”. He isolates the image of the wheelbarrow in a short poem. By doing so he is telling us that this element of the scene is important. The mystery of why it is important is left to the reader…

Although I was never much at drawing, I was always drawn to printmaking and made some rudimentary linocuts in my twenties. I liked everything about it: the use of gouges in the soft linoleum, using the roller to apply ink and in particular the rice paper with all its imperfections.

There is something that sets a print apart from a drawing or a painting. Perhaps it is the existence of multiple copies – the familiarity that repetition imparts to an image. For me photography mimics haiku poetry. The photographer captures an image in his viewfinder. The act of framing a scene sets the scene apart and says this scene is important. If done successfully, the image accomplishes what the artist was attempting precisely and economically.

The advent of the digital camera and useful graphic software has transformed the visual arts – at least for me. My work usually starts with a photograph – mine or one that I’ve ‘liberated’ from an old photo album or maybe the internet. I then use software to manipulate the image.

For the most part it is not about copying realistic visual images, but in removing elements and simplifying the image to highlight what is essential:

“With the stroke of a pen, I eliminate a telephone pole from the back forty.”

…Or it may be about combining images in the same way as a poet might build a metaphor…

-                     rob farrow

My aim is to make people laugh at danger, the world, and themselves; not as a way of escaping the frightful reality of life but rather as a way of confronting it directly.  If concern with the human condition is difficult to find in my art, it is because of the comic elements, and because my subjects (cats, birds, snakes, avaricious plants, insects, amphibians, bats) wear masks.

My art and poetry lie outside the mainstream of modern art movements.  My work does not take up the cudgel for social reform, feminism, environmentalism or any other ism, even though I am greatly concerned about environmental degradation in our earthly Eden.  I believe in art for art’s sake; in a word, making art to feed the soul.

Most of my creative work is done in the late afternoon, or in the very early hours of the morning when chronic insomnia prevails.  However, the specific time, place or circumstance is irrelevant; it is the technique of drawing, painting or writing that dominates.  I am only the servant of my muse in these creative pursuits.

Most of my creative process is cerebral.  My ideas are like rolls of film that get developed in the darkroom of my mind.  The images have infinitesimal dots of meaning that, bit by bit; start to take form in my brain.  I distort and twist the mundane world to its essential reality through craft, humour, fantasy, honesty and intensity.

-         joe rosenblatt