Homage to Matisse

“Homage to Matisse” Series Artist Statement

Color: can it ever be free
Can it be unbound?

Carefully, he scissored
Spiralling curves of yellow
Shards of green, vermillion tendrils
Into a world
Of pure color. Content, he said, be gone
Void

But the mind, the great unconscious
Plays by different rules.
(In my fevered all-night universe
The space between the shapes
Deviously asserts its rights)
The mind
Contains orgies of forms,
Shadings, metaphors
For all the things we know.

Like Matisse in his late years
I find joy in new material.
In the exuberance of my daughter’s glass
A Yungian life emerges:
Shards, tendrils, creatures
Of a primordial sea?

Or maybe a simple joy.

-Eve J. Alfillé