Cut-Out

Collage drawing, after Matisse.

Shape cut from a sheet of handwritten notes, scissored freehand, laid on a prepared page decorated with Tombow and calligraphy pens, colored with these pens.

The paper forming the outline, which fell away from my scissors as I cut, is collaged into a second drawing called Out-Cut.


“YOU, MATISSE”

I wonder how you are going to feel
when you find out
that I stood for an hour

in the stuffy air of the museum
with its humming climate control
and artificial lights

on aching feet
that kept reminding me
of the cafe downstairs

and how I couldn't move
because the goldfish you had painted
half a century before

was still swimming
under the green philodendron
in circles of turquoise delight.


Inspired by the line about “goldfish circling in its bowl” in the poem “You, Reader” by Billy Collins (which begins, “I wonder how you are going to feel / when you find out...”).


As you can see, in art and poetry I borrow shamelessly — but only from the best.