Poster Image
$20
Item#: 2002SYR11
Purchase Details
11x17-inches, printed on heavy weight (100-pound) Hammermill cover paper. We package each print with a piece of chipboard in a clear plastic sleeve.
You also receive…
An information page with photos of the artist and poet, and hand-written comments from each.
Medium- and large-format posters are available by custom order. Contact us for details.
Poem Inspiration Location
Storm Over Solvay
poster information
Description
Storm over Solvay—
Bright gulls skirl about a thick
Cloud of umbrellas
I live in Solvay. So that's where the image originates. I see Solvay in the distance when I'm driving home from the city. So I've seen storms brewing. Because that's there the weather in Syracuse starts, I guess—Solvay being the first of the smaller villages on the outskirts of Syracuse to get the weather coming from the west.
And then, one of the first things you notice driving at Solvay, say along Route 690, by the lake, are the seagulls. When a storm comes—I know this from my childhood home in England, where there are lots of seagulls—they start to get very antsy.
The cloud of umbrellas, I'm imagining. A sort of metaphorical pun. The storm clouds become a cloud of umbrellas, which are also thick and black.
Originally I took a completely different approach. I pictured something more like a Japanese print. Just a field of umbrellas, seen from above, almost like little flowers.
Roger, our professor, suggested something more surrealist and large, more like the stuff that Magritte has done.
I ended up taking a piece of the skyline in Solvay, and taking a seagull, and having him play with the umbrella, rather than having him fly around. Giving it a more singular point of attention.
You might say I'm stereotyping Syracuse weather. Things are gloomy, gray and overcast, as people like to accuse it of being. I don't know—I kind of like it.