Description
Poetry. The poet and painter Basil King takes the medieval genre of the beastiary, a collection of short writings about exotic animal species, and reconceives it as a way of engaging with a particularly fascinating human species, creating verbal and pictorial portraits of painters, from Winslow Homer to Edward Hopper. Introducer Andrew Crozier explains, "This is more a matter of affinity than of scale: an aardvark will be of more interest to another aardvark, a zebra of more interest to another zebra, than either is to me. The painter Basil King finds other painters interesting, also peculiar and exotic, not to mention obsessive, grandiose, even foolish. He pursues and collects them and the works for which they're known." Also check out King's other two recent works, Mirage: a Poem in 22 Sections and Learning to Draw/a History: Twin Towers.
Author Bio
Basil King, born in London, England before World War 2, has been painting for over seven decades and writing since 1985. He does both in Brooklyn where he has lived since 1969. He has published ten books and a dozen chapbooks of poetry since 1997 and over his lifetime has completed several thousand works of visual art in oils, inks, pastels, and mixed media. King's visual art is in the collections of the New York Public Library, Yale University, the late Morton & Lita Hornick, Wadsworth Athenaeum, Grand Valley State College, University of Kansas Museum of Art, State University of New York at Buffalo, the Gladstone Collection of Baseball Art and in private collections including that of Tom Seaver. Some 770 paintings are professionally stored.
Author City: BROOKLYN, NY USA