Poster Image
$20
Item#: 2006SYR02
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
Full Moon Shimmering
poster information
Description
Full moon shimmering
Plaintive sax howling skyward
Midnight on Walton
My husband and I were walking along Walton Street, where the restaurants and bars are. It was summer, and the full moon was out. We could hear music, and I could pick out the sax, which is my favorite instrument.
My love of sax goes back to my oldest sister, Char. She is nine years older than I am, and she had a friend who played the sax. He would sit on the corner and serenade her.
Then, as an adult, I got interested in blues, and there's a lot of sax in that. I guess I'm a frustrated blues singer, because if I'm reading a poem, I like to get into that throaty, guttural sound, like a sax. But in this poem, when I think of the sax, it's higher, like a wolf howling at midnight.
My work usually looks nothing like the poster I did. I paint very realistically—painstaking, meticulous work. But since this was for a poster, I wanted it to have more of a poster feel to it. That's why I picked the surreal colors.
I chose the poem because I liked the idea of painting something with music and the night sky. I like to draw people, so I wanted a person in the image, and since the poem is about music, I wanted the person playing music.
I took my friend, Hakeem, downtown with me and had him pose. He's not a saxophonist, but I took the picture of him in the position of how he should be. Then I took a picture of a saxophone player, to get the hands right. And then I combined the images in a drawing, and painted it.