Do you remember the old hit song by the Four Seasons? If so, you’ll get an idea of what a marvelous night I had on November 9. I made my debut as a poet on this First Friday at SoWa in Boston!
Poetry may sound funny in terms of First Fridays, as they are all about galleries and studios welcoming people to visit and view the latest art on exhibit. Let me explain.
A brilliant artist, ZsuZsanna Donnell, has attended two of my workshops. After both workshops, I emailed a poem to the people who’d attended — and both times, ZsuZsanna wrote back to me to say she’d done a painting with the same title as my poem. This was too much of a coincidence to ignore, and so we decided we’d collaborate. And, since ZsuZsanna had a gallery show scheduled in her SoWa studio for the November First Friday, we made that our focus.
Another great coincidence is that ZsuZsanna came to my first workshop seeking inspiration to continue her work making large-scale paintings. And, my work is all about teaching people to live big. So, “big” was a theme for both of us.
Having made our plan, ZsuZsanna sent me a photo of her magnificent painting titled, “Oh My”. It’s 6' wide and 7' tall, and even in jpeg form it took my breath away! The poem for that painting poured out onto my keyboard, and I couldn’t wait for her to send more images of her paintings and their titles. As they arrived, I wrote poems for each. Poems for “Continuum”, “Common Ground”, “More”, and “Zero to Infinity” soon followed.
I printed the poems out large, to hang next to the canvases. We spent a great day hanging the show. We also wanted the opening to be a time for people to get creative themselves, so I brought strips with phrases from my poems and ZsuZsanna brought color prints of lots of her art. We set up a worktable, provided scissors, glue sticks, tape and markers, and devoted one of the gallery walls for people post their collaged creations.