Art evokes the unknowable mystery
without which the world would not exist.
Everything we see
hides something else.
We want to see what’s hidden
by the thing we see.
Bar from your mind
what you have seen.
Be on the lookout for
what you have never seen.
The mind sees in two senses:
It sees, as with the eyes
and it sees as a question.
We are surrounded by curtains of semblance.
(This is not a pipe!)
Our secret desire is for
change in the order of things.
The present reeks of mediocrity,
the atom bomb.
The power to surprise and delight us?
I call this power poetry.
I want nothing we know about.
Life obliges me to do something,
so I paint.
From the words of Rene Magritte
Linda Frye Burnham 2013
“Buds after Magritte,” woodland banner by Steven Durland
Rene Magritte, “Le Viol” (1935