Ravels in Review Friday

Maybe it was the confluence of Friday the 13th and Valentine’s Day, but posts this week veered from sweetly feminine to strongly feminist. Or maybe it was the full moon and hormones. You be the judge.

We went from (egads!) love poems, to an art salon, which, by the way, proved to be quite enjoyable, to a mini-bio of portrait painter Louise-Elisabeth Vigee-Le Brun, who success at the turn of the 19th c. was unprecedented. From Le Brun’s Rococo paintings of women in big hats, we skipped forward in time to a fashion week rif, in which some new designs looked rather like Le Brun’s paintings, and all this led to the feminist ‘fabrics’ of painter Nancy Friedmann.

In a gender-neutral moment, I wrote yesterday about BECA‘s program for emerging artists and how they are supporting it with this amazing $5 raffle. It’s a great prize for a good cause, so check it out.

What’s next on the agenda? Possibly some L.E.S. gallery reporting and a theater review. Stay tuned.

Love Poems (It is Valentine’s Day after all)


I never knew until this morning
That Manhattan could be pink and blue
Or how much I love you, asleep
Deep in those closed eyes
Is your dream of pink treetops, Chagall visions?
Are we floating through the sky with a goat?
Is it as silent and white and pure
As I feel in my waking dream of you?
I wonder if Eve, on the first morning of creation,
Had an inkling of the way she could rip
the fabric of dreams.


Green is my love
Green like the blades of grass in Spring
Warlike wounds to the soles of my feet
Pricks to the red red exterior of my beating
Is green love so warlike, so prickly?
I know a childhood rhyme about a zebra.
What’s green and red all over, lover?

A love trembling, a quaking soul,
Heart’s red drips on new grass
A lover who finds Spring comes early.

There are no trees in my garden.
Grass has been cut, hedges pruned.
Attacked by love, I lack strength.
I fall to green grass and look up,
Up to the stars and sky,
But I can’t see—branches hang over
And shadows shelter the ground.
A tree has grown in my garden.

It grew unmolested and unmolesting,
Until faintly, I fell.