Self-portrait through a Keyhole: Digital, Pearl Metallic Paper, 7.5″ x 10″
Lateafternoonhawk: Digital, Pearl Metallic Paper, 18″ x 12″
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Nude with 3-urinal Chastity Belt: Digital, Pearl Metallic Paper, 5″ x 17″
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Medium Walking the Sea of Serenity: Digital, Pearl Metallic Paper,11″ x 11″
(Kind of an homage to Chagall)
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Succubus Dragging a Shitstorm into the Rear View Mirror:
Digital, Pearl Metallic Paper, 7.5″ x 10″ (1 of 2 versions)
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Welcome to the Weingarten Museum of Victorian and Ancient Archeology:
Digital, Pearl Metallic Paper, 12″ x 18″
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Pasodoble: Digital, Pearl Metallic Paper, 4″ x 7.5″
—Roger Weingarten
Roger Weingarten and another NC poet/artist Kate Fetherston are having a two-person show opening this Friday, March 4. The event kicks off at 6pm with reading at Bridgeside Books, 29 Stowe Street, Waterbury, VT, then moves downstreet to Axel’s Gallery, 5 Stowe Street, for art opening—Friday March 4.
See Weingarten’s poems on NC here.
See Kate Fetherston’s poem & paintings here.
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Roger Weingarten, author of ten collections of poetry, and co-editor of eight poetry and prose anthologies, has lectured, taught and read at writers’ conferences, poetry festivals, and universities nationally and internationally. He founded and taught in the MFA in Writing and the Postgraduate Writers’ Conference at Vermont College. His awards include a Pushcart Prize, a Louisville Review Poetry Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Award, and an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award in Literature. Stranger at Home: American Poetry with an Accent: co-edited with Andrey Gritsman, Interpoezia Press, was published in 2008, Premature Elegy by Firelight by Longleaf Press in 2007, and Open Book: Essays from the Postgraduate Writers’ Conference, co-edited with Kate Fetherston by Cambridge Scholars’ Press in 2007.
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wild-and-crazy-guy-gorgeousness! and wit!
The light paintings look fantastic ; a pairing to the already in place Roger W. artistic legacy!
I had the great good fortune of seeing Roger’s work face to face this past summer…and it’s truly breathtaking.
Amazing art Roger! I’m not normal a fan of “digital” and tend to find a lot of work in digital media to be emotionally distancing and visually flat, but your work manages, for me at least, to create a true visual presence and emotional vibrancy. Urinal Chasity Belt? What were you thinking?-
These images are vivacious, colorful, and bristling with rich detail, just like Weingarten’s poems.
Self Portrait Thru a Key Hole has many things going for it.
Color is exceptional. The predominant blue is beautifully highlighted, then reintroduced over and over in ever more subtle ways that are perfectly balanced. Yellow then strikes you as central while holding the next colors that move your eyes around. Shading is introduced to acquaint you with the other wonderful tones. Finally the totally effective black creates the continuity of the whole piece.
The artistic talent is so amazing in the figure itself. So many things are being asked, not told. Is the face sad or contemplative? Is the figure sloppy or casual? Is this Mr. Cool or Mr. Vagrant?
Ron Winger
Port Townsend, Washington
3/3/2016
Wow! Such colorful, vibrant images!
Keep going back to the self-portrait, If all portraits are self-portraits, this tops my pleasure list. Everything about it is Roger in every way. Tells a story the way Weingarten poems do–that visual scene, that emotional punch, that lovely element of mystery.
Thanks, old buddy.
Roger’s genius is to combine a visual expression of his imagination (strange and Picassoesque as it is!…as reflected in his poetry) with an exquisite craft in the use of the latest digital technology. Yet as if that were not enough, his extreme and tireless intellectual gifts never cease to inform his visual work, which, in and of itself, leads the innocent viewer down a rabbit hole of strange multilingual, medieval, and even biblical metaphors, allusions, erotic outrageousness, and always irreverent and often dark humor.
I’ll leave his self-portrait for others to comment on.
As I study the pieces reproduced here, I find myself scrolling up and down from one piece to the next and back again, laughing as I spy the images of three bathroom urinals that form the chastity belt of the female image, fragmenting around, and finally overtaking, the upper body of the figure, exploding into bits of stain glass and tumbling down into the background.
Hours could pass as I gaze at the deep blue ball taking me into outer space looking back at the blue ball of the earth. Medium? Am I looking down on a great green bird with red leading wing feathers embracing rich floral pinks, reds, greens, and blues, which in turn surround a vast deep blue sea? I wonder. There is so much more.
Then comes a succubus dragging a shitstorm into the rear view mirror. With a bit of research I discover the connection between the urinals of the chastity belt and a medieval Kabalistic succubus that only Roger would have known. Dark and erotic humor indeed! Roger’s mind is here toying with the myths that arise when cultures attempt to control the human erotic urges.
Next I find myself back in the nineteenth century Fairbanks Museum with its long glass-covered wooden showcases in the center and glass-fronted showcases along the walls and a dinosaur skeleton off center. Yet, here again, Roger deconstructs this Victorian museum and reimagines it with modern images, all layered with color and line swimming before the eyes of the viewer into a fun house of contemporary wonder.
Pasodoble: Here Roger recreates the sounds of the dance of the Spanish bullfight with pure color, transforming the dance of death (Danse Macabre) of the bull into a ballroom death dance of the human partners. The colors run from cold to hot, top to bottom, as death emerges from hell to pull the innocent dancing partners down into its flames.
“Lateafternoonhawk,” an irreal homage to Hopper’s Nighthawks, is something else and needs to be looked at full screen–way too complex for the little smartphone thingy I started with. Those saturated metallic colors, the chair on table inversions, what look like wall lanterns on fire, that cook concentrating on something out of sight through the half-circle wall opening, that moody bleeding frame around the lonely guy lost in eating a wrap, like he’s playing some kind of wind instrument, and that large clock-like object on the wall above the cook just caught my eye–seems most of the hands are a contortionist nude aimed, like a 19th century Paris peep show, our way. Wonder how Lautrec would see this? Weingarten’s certainly driven digital art into a place where the viewer is anything but passive. I Dig them all, but this one’s gotten under my skin.
Roger is as amazing as a visual artist as he is as a poet. These are strange, spooky, and drop-dead gorgeous at the same time. To quote an old hippy of my acquaintance, “Oh wow!”
Fabulous artwork from the mind of an essential poet. Bravo!
I’ve been a fan of Roger Weingarten’s poetry for a couple of decades now. This new visual work is another fantastic expression of the bawdy, beautiful, twisted, and tender organ that is Roger’s multiply-blessed mind.
Alive, challenging, vibrant, polished – where else have I come in contact with anything like this? Oh yes, Roger’s poetry.
As another longtime follower/fan of Roger’s life’s work in poetry, I’m compelled to add my voice to this chorus. To see him branching out in this artistic direction at this stage of his career is both utterly surprising and not at all so. Indeed, it all stems from that same source, that singular and wildly complex sensibility. Such arresting images and surreal luminosity. “Welcome to the Weingarten Museum” is right! Thanks to Numero Cinq for presenting this marvelous sampler.