The clouds are dissolving the mountains, an accumulation of visibility from mist. Gentleness, do us this favor when facing the obdurate, a balance of power, weather shaping environments, one of rough, mighty crags and hard edges, the other rounding in rumples disappearing together as if lifting off. So these mountaintops gradually float like great galleons with the mysterious illusions of nature as lyricism, a hologram in the process of painting its own colors transparent. There is such great urgency when fog is smoke instead, that dry fiery bristling below the shifting line of plumes, as if trees were caught in oily red waves of wreckage to call while cracking and falling adrift. What scale of justice or weight for these two pictures of the very same landscape circumstances are responsible for via global warming or the time before all of that? One is an Asian-influenced haiku of the most elegant brushwork on satin, and the other apocalyptic realism documented as fact for what was once abstract in theory. Oh, an attempt at intelligence and a love for language, pretentious or not, how to go on having belief in the point of art as a conscience which bears witness should the beautiful natural world perish along with us who would sustain? So citizens, planet-inhabitants, just like lovers ask & that must be impetus enough against the great chance of futility, of failure, versus sticking it out, making strife - sustenance.
Stephen Mead (he/him), a mixed-media artist, first began seeing his poems published in little literary print magazines in his mid-twenties, until in the late 1980s when he moved to Provincetown, Mass to focus more on visual work. Around 2000, making use of the internet, he began publishing his art and writing combined. In addition to his art being shown in physical gallery spaces, since then his poetry, essays, art and hybrid-work (collage-films, sound-collage downloads) have been published internationally in over one hundred both print/online magazines and artistic platforms. He also has an Amazon author central page where many of his art-poetry books and novels may be purchased. Currently he is resident artist/curator for the Chroma Museum, an online space depicting over 600 artistic montage renderings of LGBTQI historical figures, organizations and allies predominantly before Stonewall.
