The Universe Eyed From The Back Row
Leonardo da Vinci
Detested Maeve Binchy
But his mate Botticelli
Had a thing about Mary Shelley
Vincent van Gogh
Had one ear sawn off
He'd nurse it for hours
Then paint a few sunflowers
The painter called Titian
Was an amateur magician
With tricks in the darkness
Not for him was up-with-the-larkness
Hieronymus Bosch
Was frightfully posh
To hear him talk
You'd think he'd a mouthful of chalk
Salvador Dali
Painted like he was on Charlie
His works kept people spellbound
Though they rated his person lower than a hell-hound
René Magritte
Was the scourge of his street
But in the country he let his hair down
Although he never put an apple or pear down
Francis Bacon
Was rather taken
With a young chap who posed for a particular étude
Nude, but without being crude
Edward Burne-Jones
Sold paintings to pay off his loans
(And, by way of a digression,
To fund several practitioners of the oldest profession)
Lucian Freud
Got rather annoyed
Every time he made a slip
It was hailed as a triumph of craftsmanship
Gilbert and George
Confer, then disgorge
A material that may look like paint
But it ain't
Rembrandt van Rijn
Is no friend of mine
His passion for self-depiction
Comes close to addiction
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Crashed his van into the back of my car
It made a great impression
I sold the car for millions, God bless him!
Edward Hopper
Had a thing for Karl Popper
Though his paradigms were unreliable
His syntheses were viable
Works of Jackson Pollock's
Were painted by his bollocks
How strange to become an Artistic Totem
Through bedaubing a scrotem
The reputation of Stanley Spencer
Grew as he made the paint denser
The only use he had for Turps
Was distressing the colours with targeted burps
Bridget Riley
Deserves to be rated highly
Being an anagram of Liberty Dirge
Her works are rather hard to purge
Whereas Gavin Turk
Has an interesting body of work
Some say its funeral is long overdue
And I'd never heard of him - had you?
Meanwhile Damien Hirst
Has his earnings disbursed
By way of a laugh
His agent cuts them neatly in half
It's queer that Vermeer
Is no longer here
When so many others
Turned into our mothers
| Contributors: | Beefy, Roland, Padfoot, P, Apsley, Karin, choke, Grayman, F, dkb, fester. |
| Poem finished: | 2nd July 2004 by F. |